The Department of Education announced two updates this week to address several continuing issues it is working to address related to its ongoing Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) implementation roll out.

The first update is a fix to the long-running issue of contributors without Social Security numbers (SSNs) being unable to access a student’s FAFSA. Due to the fix, these contributors now have access to their student’s FAFSA. Prior to this update, if a contributor without a SSN tried to start the FAFSA for a student, or if they were asked to contribute to an in-progress form, they would be met with errors that would prevent them from successfully completing their portion.

While this solution is good news, the Department is still working on other persistent issues affecting contributors without SSNs. As the Department works on permanent solutions to these issues, it is publishing a new tips document for non-SSN contributors, which is available in English and in Spanish.

The second update is that the Department has fixed errors related to its Student Aid Index (SAI) calculation. The SAI calculation was incorrectly omitting reported assets for families whose parents filed separate tax returns but whose combined adjusted gross income (AGI) exceeded the threshold requiring them to report assets on the FAFSA. The result is that, for affected students, their amount of need was overstated in their initial SAIs, which will cause them to receive less aid once their FAFSA is processed.

With the Department’s fix, SAIs are being updated to reflect the accurate aid amount for students. However, the Department is still determining how to adjust the initial, inaccurate SAIs sent to affected students and when that process will be completed. A small batch of these FAFSAs may be rejected during processing because of the need to report assets, so students, contributors, or the school will need to submit a correction to this information once that process is available.