Finding Text
2024-005 Significant Deficiency: National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS) Report (U.S. Department of Education, William D. Ford Direct Loan Program, ALN #84.268 and Federal Pell Grant Program, ALN #84.063) (Repeat finding of 2022-001 and 2023-003)
Criteria: In accordance with 34 CFR 685.309(b) and 34 CFR section 690.83(b)(2), for Direct Loans and Pell grants, respectively, once the Enrollment Reporting roster file is received from the NSLDS, the institution must update the Enrollment Reporting roster file for changes in student status, report the date the enrollment status was effective, enter the new anticipated completion date, and submit the changes to NSLDS.
Statement of Condition: During the audit, it was noted that the University incorrectly reported student enrollment status for changes in enrollment.
Questioned Costs: Such information is not applicable for this finding since it is nonmonetary in nature.
Perspective Information: The audit included a detailed testing of 40 student files, of which this significant deficiency applies to 18, indicating an error rate of 45.00%.
Cause and Effect: Due to lapses in communication between departments, in certain instances, the University failed to provide NSLDS with accurate updates to student enrollment statuses, resulting in misrepresentation within the NSLDS system.
Recommendation: The University should ensure that the correct enrollment status is reported to NSLDS.
View of Responsible Officials: The University acknowledges this finding. While the university did implement changes from the prior year, including randomly sampling students, after this finding and looking into the issue that was occurring, we found three more issues with our clearinghouse data. The first issue was our graduation file that was sent to clearinghouse was not being processed and being rejected. We were unaware of the rejection of the records. We are currently still working with clearinghouse to find what is causing the graduation file to reject and are working on getting that corrected. The second issue was that some student files were individually being rejected and thus not processing fully through. To correct this issue, we are watching the rejected clearinghouse files for individual students and are manually reporting their statuses if we cannot get the file to accept. The final and third issue was that students who were unofficially or administratively withdrawn were pulling the wrong date and thus the status was showing the wrong dates for the occurrence. To fix this, financial aid and the registrar are working in tandem to ensure that the correct date that the actual unofficial withdrawal or administrative withdrawal is correct. If necessary, we will manually certify these students as well.