Contact person responsible for correction action – Mitzi Suhler, Financial Aid Director Anticipated completion date – June 30, 2025 Corrective action Sterling College agrees with the finding. At the time of this noncompliance the College was implementing a new financial aid system (JFA). The financial aid system went live in July 2024. The business office module did not go live until November 2024. The college’s IT implemented a bridge to connect the two systems while we waited for the business office module to go live. There were issues with the bridge between the two systems which caused the aid posting process to work inaccurately. We immediately contacted IT to help with the situation, but they took longer than expected to find a solution. Because we knew time was of the essence and our system would be “going dark” (unable to process anything for a period of time), we manually started processing aid in order to post aid to student accounts so that students could receive their refunds. The financial aid system had disbursement dates already set up and all of those dates had to be manually updated. Unfortunately, the College missed updating one date for the student that was found during audit, and the date that was reported to COD was the original disbursement date instead of the actual disbursement date. The system no longer requires the bridge, and we have not experienced any issues since all systems came on board. Now that the system is working properly, there is a process that looks at the disbursement date on the student account and compares it to what the financial aid system has in place. If the dates do not match, the system automatically updates the disbursement date in the financial aid system and there is a file that is generated to send an update to COD automatically. We do not expect to have this issue in the future but have implemented processes to review disbursement dates through the reconciliation process in the new system.