Finding Text
Finding 2024-003 - Significant Deficiency, Compliance
Federal Assistance Listing Number. 84.063, 84.268
U.S. Department Of Education
Student Financial Aid Cluster – Reporting
Criteria: According to the 2023-2024 COD Technical Reference and 2023-2024 FSA Handbook, the University must report accurate disbursement dates to Common Origination Disbursement (COD) for all direct loan and pell grant disbursements made to students.
Condition: In our nonstatistical sample of 40 students, we noted 13 students whose disbursement dates listed in the University’s student ledger differed from the date reported as the disbursement date within COD as reported by the University.
Context: For the 13 students noted there were a total of 17 disbursements of Pell grant, subsidized loan, unsubsidized loan, and PLUS loan disbursements. Of the 17 disbursement date exceptions noted, 11 of the disbursement dates reported in COD differed by 6 days or less, while 6 of the disbursement dates reported in COD differed by 20 days or more from the date of disbursement noted in the University’s student ledger.
Effect: Improperly reported disbursement dates could impact the amount of interest charged to the student or impact the ability for the University or the U.S. Department of Education to properly reconcile disbursement and drawdown data.
Questioned Costs: There were no questioned costs related to this finding.
Cause: The University’s original disbursement date that was reported to COD was not updated with the updated disbursement date when the updated batch reporting occurred for these students after the student’s original planned disbursement date had passed.
Identification Of Repeat Finding: This is not a repeat finding.
Recommendation: The University should correct the disbursement dates for the students that it knows have disbursement dates reported to COD that differ from the dates in the University’s student ledger for the year ended June 30, 2024. The University should implement controls to ensure that a review is completed of the batch uploads to COD to ensure that the disbursement dates are accurately reported.
Views Of Responsible Officials (Unaudited): The University concurs with the finding and has made t the required corrections to the COD disbursement dates. The University process when posting Aid has remained consistent each year, this appears to be an isolated incident where CAMS did not pick up the date listed on the disbursement screen for these students and pass that to COD. The University has implemented a control to complete the disbursements each time and then verify the date reflects correctly in COD afterwards. While this should be an automatic process, and has been in previous years, it will be something the University verifies now with each aid posting.
Completion Date: August 2024
Contact Person: Megan Morton, Director of Financial Services