Verification
Completing the verification process is an important step in making sure you can access your financial aid.
What is Verification?
When a student/family completes and submits the FAFSA, they may be randomly selected by the federal government for a process known as “verification”. Verification is essentially an audit of your FAFSA, and it means that the college is required by the federal government to “verify” the information you provided before we can award or disburse financial aid.
Verification does not necessarily mean you made a mistake on the FAFSA. Most students/families are selected randomly, but while we may be able to provide you an estimate of you financial aid if you are selected for verification, there are some important next steps you’ll need to complete in order to make sure that aid can be finalized.
Completing the Verification process
First, completion of a Verification Worksheet is required. There are different kinds of verification worksheets and which one you should complete depends on the Dependent/Independent status of the student and the level of verification selected by the federal government on the FAFSA form. There are links to PDFs of the forms below, or you may also complete the process electronically via self service.
The second part of the Verification process is to confirm the numbers filed on the Federal IRS tax return. There are a variety of ways to accomplish this task.
- Use the Data Retrieval Tool from within the FAFSA site to retrieve IRS tax return information electronically.
- Request a Federal Tax Return Transcript by calling 1-800-908-9946, or visiting IRS.gov and clicking on “Get My Tax Records.” You may also complete the IRS form 4506-T, which is a Request of Transcript of Tax Return.
Please check your mail at home for a letter from Monmouth College requesting the documentation needed to complete the Verification process. If you have questions or are unclear on what documentation we still need from you, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!
Timelines and Deadlines
We ask that you provide the requested verification documentation within three weeks of our request (but no later than one month prior to your planned enrollment) to allow us time to provide you with complete and accurate information about your eligibility for financial assistance. Failure to provide this information will prevent us from disbursing financial assistance to you and may result in you not being allowed to enroll if you have not secured the funding necessary to cover your out-of-pocket costs. The sooner you provide us with this information, the longer we have to plan appropriately for your attendance at Monmouth College. Once your documents have been reviewed and any necessary changes made to your FAFSA (by our staff), your final financial aid awards will be viewable to you at: https://ss.monmouthcollege.edu/Student/FinancialAid/Home. We look forward to working with you and helping you through this process!
Self-service
Students can access financial aid and billing information electronically using the self-service portal.