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Thursday, March 15, 2012

FAFSA Update

Sooooo, I and 10 zillion other people received this correction. I sent a query to the FAFSA people--I assume I was not the only one pointing out that the income tax filing date is more than a month away and that the email was incomprehensible.


We recently sent an e-mail advising you to update your tax data on the FAFSA once you have filed your tax return. Please note that the e-mail stated in error that the federal tax filing deadline has passed. You should disregard that sentence. The federal tax deadline this year is April 17. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused. You should still update the tax information on your FAFSA after you file your federal taxes, and we strongly encourage you to do that by importing your 2011 income tax information from the IRS into your FAFSA using the IRS Data Retrieval Tool.

U.S. Department of Education


It seems that the real message is that you can import 2011 tax info from the IRS website. That would have been a one-sentence email.

I could be wrong....

3 comments:

Patience_Crabstick said...

Is the IRS retrieval tool a new thing? I've been filling out the FAFSA for three years and have never used it before, but it's a moot issue because we don't qualify for any aid. I'm always hoping one of my kids will get a work study job out of it.

Frugal Scholar said...

@PC--I think that the IRS is encouraging people to file online. It is free for low income, but costs for middle and above. So I just do a paper form. This is just a wild guess, of course.

I think work-study is based on need also.

Shelley said...

I do the paper form, too. I don't feel I have as much control with the online stuff and I want to see how it all works before I send it in. Glad it's not just me...had no idea there were charges for doing this online. What a joke! Yet another tax!