On January 30, 2018, EDUCAUSE, a higher education technology association, submitted a letter to the U.S. Department of Education describing concerns that it had with the Federal Student Aid (“FSA”) ability to protect federal student financial aid data. EDUCAUSE’s members include IT professionals from over 1,800 colleges and universities as well as other organizations.

First,

Last week, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Federal Student Aid (FSA) announced that the Data Retrieval Tool (DRT) on fafsa.gov and StudentLoans.gov will be unavailable until extra security protections could be added. Since 2010, students have been able to use the DRT to transfer tax data directly into the Free Application for Federal Student