Federal Verification

If your application has been selected for verification, your FAFSA Submission Summary will include a note indicating so. Also, we will send you an email. 

Additional requests for required information will show up in your SIS To Do List. Click the link in your To Do List for more information about each item.

We recommend that you submit verification documents as soon as possible to avoid delays later in processing your financial aid. In general, you must complete verification by the last day of your enrollment during the school year in question.

Please note that once verification is complete, federal rules prohibit us from making certain changes to your financial aid offer.

If you don’t complete the verification process, you will not receive a financial aid offer. 

In rare cases, even if you’ve already received aid, you may be selected later for verification. If that happens, you’ll need to complete the required items in your To Do List to keep your aid. Failure to complete these items will result in aid cancellation, and any disbursed aid may be reversed, potentially leaving a balance on your student account. 

If you choose not to complete verification and want to cancel your aid application, submit the Financial Aid Application Cancellation Request for the appropriate academic year.

Verification often requires us to make corrections or updates to the data that you reported within your application. If we make corrections to your FAFSA, you will receive a new FAFSA Submission Summary.

These corrections may change the Student Aid Index (SAI). We'll use the SAI from your verified application to determine your official financial aid offer.

In most cases, you must provide documentation to verify tax data or proof of identity and statement of educational purpose. Beginning with the 2024-2025 FAFSA, applicants and their contributors are required to provide consent and approve the sharing and importing of income and tax information from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to the FAFSA in a process called the Direct Data Exchange (DDX). When an applicant and their contributor(s) successfully use the DDX when completing the FAFSA, the unchanged tax data, or Federal Tax Information (FTI), serves as the primary source of documentation for verification of income and no further documentation is needed. 

If the tax information for the applicant and their contributor(s) was not available or the DDX could not be used, a signed copy of the applicant’s and their contributors’ 2022 federal income tax return should be submitted.

If you are selected for verification and have a special tax situation, we may need you to provide additional documentation. 

You may be considered to have a special tax situation if you: 

• Filed an Amended IRS Income Tax Return 
• Were a victim of IRS identity theft 
• Received a filing extension from the IRS 

If you are selected for verification and fall into one of these special tax categories, please reach out to us at [email protected] for further information about how to proceed.

If you change your FAFSA after receiving your official financial aid offer, you might still be selected for verification. We may also ask for additional documentation to verify your eligibility for state and institutional need-based funds. In either case, we'll add required items to your To-Do List in SIS, and we’ll notify you via email. Your official financial aid offer can’t be completed until all To-Do List items are finished.

Throughout the academic year, we conduct internal audits of financial aid offers. Occasionally, students may be asked for additional documents or experience minor changes to their official financial aid offer as a result of these audits.