Families planning to file the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) over the next few weeks should allot extra time. The Internal Revenue Service has temporarily suspended its Data Retrieval Tool (DRT) used to automatically import tax data. For now, students filing the FAFSA or applying for the government’s income-driven repayment plans must manually input data from 2015 tax returns.

It took nearly a week for the U.S. Department of Education and Internal Revenue Service to publically acknowledge that the tool wasn’t working. A message on the FAFSA Web site initially attributed it to “system maintenance.” But the interruption -- during the middle of financial aid season -- is no ordinary glitch.

According to a statement issued by the IRS and the Department of Education, the suspension is expected to last several weeks and it’s “a precautionary step following concerns that information from the tool could potentially be misused by identity thieves.” They don’t believe people using the tool need to take additional action.

As the two agencies try to figure out how to strengthen data security, students are scrambling to meet FAFSA filing deadlines in a number of states.

Between October and December, students filed 5.4 million FAFSAs for the 2017-18 academic year -- a good start considering it was the first year filing was permitted before January 1. But as Erin Timmons, director of communications for the National Association of Financial Aid Administrators (NAFSAA), points out, that’s a fraction of the 19.7 million FAFSAs filed during 2015-16 (the most recently completed year).

“Students with high financial need tend to file later in the process so are more likely to be affected by the [IRS] DRT outage,” she tells Financial Advisor.

According to the IRS Web site, students who don’t use the seven-year-old data retrieval tool are also more likely to be selected for tax verification. NASFAA sent a letter this week to the Department of Education urging it, among other things, to take immediate action to ease the application and verification burdens imposed on students and schools by the sudden outage of the IRS tool.

“We have been hearing from our members that they are fearful that the number of required verifications schools must process will go up because of the DRT outage,” says Timmons.  

According to a Wall Street Journal article, Purdue University saw twice as many applications flagged for verification this week than it typically does. The Office of Financial Aid at Rutgers University tells Financial Advisor that student eligibility for financial aid will not be impacted by any delay in federal processing but that it encourages students who haven’t yet applied for aid to do so as soon as possible.

NAFSAA encourages students who are confused or having difficulty filing the FAFSA to contact college financial aid offices. The Senate and House education committees are pressing the Department of Education for more information about cause and the scope of the outage of the IRS Data Retrieval Tool.