From the desk of...

Robert Weinerman, Director of Training

FSA is Working on the 2027-2028 Application and Verification Guide. Here are Two Changes I’d Like to See.

I’ve just completed the six Iron Bridge Resources’ free spring webinars, and over 1,200 people participated in them. Thank you to everyone who attended, asked great questions, and shared the information with their colleagues.

These webinars looked at the 2027-2028 draft FAFSA and the 2025 Form 1040 and used these to predict changes coming to the 2027-2028 processing cycle. If you participated in these webinars or viewed a recorded version, then you know that the IRS has introduced check boxes on Form 1040, lines 4c and 5c, that will be used to indicate that the untaxed portion of an IRA or pension distribution contains a rollover. This replaces the prior indicator, which was the word “rollover” written onto line 4 or line 5. Since the AVG guidance specifically mentions the old line 4 and line 5 descriptor, this guidance needs to be rewritten.

Since this will have to happen anyway, I thought I’d look at the guidance related to verifying a rollover and related to adding a child born after the FAFSA was filed to the family size and make suggestions about how these can be clarified and cleaned up.

If you agree with any of these suggestions and have connections at the Department of Education, please feel free to share them with the Department.

1)   Clarify or change the documentation required if a contributor to an applicant’s FAFSA reports a non-zero value for an IRA or pension rollover

If you entered the financial aid field after the 2018-2019 academic year, you may not know that prior to that year, tax information that could not be verified with unchanged data from the IRS Data Retrieval Tool could only be verified with a tax return transcript. Tax returns were not acceptable unless there was ....