Finding 1160854 (2025-002)

Federal program Federal Pell Grant Program AL #: 84.063 Award Year: 2024/2025 Type of finding Significant Deficiency and Noncompliance Compliance requirement Enrollment Reporting Criteria Under 34 CFR 685.309, Institutions are required to report enrollment information under the Pell grant and the Direct and FFEL loan programs via the NSLDS. Institutions must review, update, and certify student enrollment statuses, program information, and effective dates that appear on the Enrollment Reporting Roster file or on the Enrollment Maintenance page of the NSLDS Professional Access website which the financial aid administrator can access for the auditor. Condition We noted one out of forty judgmentally selected students the withdrawal date per PeopleSoft was accurate at 10/3/2024 and it was inaccurately reported as 10/30/2024 into NSLDS. The error was corrected by the Associate Director of Financial Aid Compliance (within NSLDS) and Assistant Registrar (within NSCH) when identified in June 2025. Questioned costs None Context The student’s withdrawal date was inaccurately reported to NSLDS due to human error. Cause When performing enrollment reporting for return of funds students, the Student Financial Aid office (SFA) uses a tracking worksheet to document critical data and ensure communication between SFA and the Registrar. When SFA transcribed information from the return of funds worksheet to the tracking worksheet, a 0 was inadvertently added from the withdrawal date of 10/3 to 10/30. Then, that tracking worksheet was used to perform NSLDS enrollment reporting, with the incorrectly transcribed date being entered into NSLDS. This error was caused by human error. Effect The student’s withdrawal date was listed correctly within the University’s system, therefore, there was no effect to the accuracy of aid distributed or return of funds. This is strictly an enrollment reporting error and as a result, the student’s Campus Level and Program Level screens within NSLDS were inaccurate. Repeat finding NoRecommendations We recommend that the University have controls in place to review the status change information included in the batch reports prior to uploading the data to NSLDS ensure that all required reporting is completed timely and accurately. View of responsible officials It was discovered that for one student a transcription error was made when transcribing the LDA (last date of attendance) from the student’s return of funds worksheet to SFA’s and Registrar’s enrollment tracking document of return of funds students. This student was an unofficial withdrawal at the end of the Fall 2024 semester. The Compliance Officer created a RT24 workflow tracking worksheet to identify enrollment reporting dates and ensure communication between SFA and the Registrar. This includes, but is not limited to, unofficial withdrawals with a LDA, all Fs with a LDA, and Q drops with an LDA. There may be other reasons there will be different enrollment dates, and those are also charted. The Compliance Officer will now run a query from PeopleSoft that pulls return of funds information directly from the PeopleSoft worksheet. This query will be imported into a tracking worksheet to ensure accurate enrollment reporting dates. This new tracking worksheet will remove the need for any additional manual updates to enrollment data tracking and reduce the possibility of future transcription errors.