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Education Dept. recalls student aid forms after 'clerical' mistakes

WASHINGTON - The Department of Education recalled 3.5 million Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) forms yesterday that were printed with mistakes in the instructions.

All of the 3.5 millions forms sent to colleges, universities and high schools were in the shipping process when the mistake was caught Friday, said Karen Santos Freeman, communications director for the Student Financial Assistance division of the Department of Education.

The 2000-2001 FAFSA Worksheet is required to receive financial aid from the federal government next school year, although electronic versions are available.

"We were able to catch almost all of them," Freeman said. "One hundred thousand slipped through the system."

She said those 100,000 forms were sent to 61 small colleges. The department is working to retrieve them. The corrected versions are being printed, and shipping will resume tomorrow and should be delivered to schools within two weeks.

The errors on the original form deal with wrong numbers in references to tax returns.

The FAFSA forms require applicants to list the amount on certain lines of their tax returns, but the forms cited the wrong lines when referring to the KEOUGH retirement fund or for filings with TeleFile, the Internal Revenue Service telephone filing system.

She said the mistakes occurred because the reference numbers were changed from last year, what she said was a "clerical mistake." The glitch was brought to her attention by a Boston University financial aid administrator.

Freeman said if students receive the erroneous forms, they will not have major problems.

"It could be fine, even with the mistakes in there," she said.

If students do not need to insert numbers for either KEOUGH contributions or telephone IRS filing, there will not be any mistakes in the form.

The Department of Education changed the post office box for the new batch of forms, allowing them to catch applications submitted with the mistakes and address them individually.

The 61 locations where the remaining forms were shipped are mostly community colleges and technical schools.

Some locations only received one copy of the form, while others received more than 100.

In addition, branches of the University of Hawaii, University of Alaska, Franklin Pierce College and Texas A&M received the wrong form.

Almost six million paper FAFSA forms were processed last year, with more than one million filed electronically. This year's electronic forms were not available yet and therefore were not effected by the error, Freeman said.

Tim McDonough, director of public affairs for the American Council on Education, said he is concerned that a glitch occurred in the system but is pleased by the Education Department's fast response.

"We expect that this will lead to some delay, but the mistakes were caught early in the process," he said. "It shouldn't lead to big delays or jeopardize financial aid awards."

Larry Zaglaniczny, director for congressional relations at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said errors on the FAFSA forms occur from time to time, but they are usually caught in time to limit concerns.

"You're always concerned that there are errors," he said. "But I am sure that after finding those mistakes, they went through it carefully."