Federal Student Aid: Progress in Integrating Pell Grant and Direct Loan Systems and Processes, but Critical Work Remains
Highlights
To address system problems and other long-standing management weaknesses, in 1998, the Congress created a discrete unit within the Department of Education, the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA). This office subsequently adopted a new approach to systems integration using middleware (a type of software that can allow an application to access data residing in different databases) and Extensible Markup Language (XML)--a flexible, nonproprietary set of standards that is intended to make it easier to identify, integrate, and process information widely dispersed among systems and organizations. FSA's first use of this approach is the Common Origination and Disbursement (COD) process for the Direct Loan, Pell Grant, and campus-based programs. GAO initiated a follow-up review to assess FSA's progress in implementing this process.
Recommendations
Recommendations for Executive Action
| Agency Affected | Recommendation | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Department of Education | To determine the extent to which the new COD process is achieving expected results related to customer satisfaction and financial integrity, the Secretary of Education should direct FSA's Chief Operating Officer to expeditiously develop metrics and baseline data to measure these benefits and develop a tracking process to assess the extent to which the expected results are being achieved. |
Closed – Implemented
Education has implemented this recommendation in that it has established customer satisfaction and financial integrity performance measures and is tracking against them. In particular, it (1) administered a questionnaire to Common Origination and Disbursement (COD) users to measure their satisfaction for the past 2 years, and (2) is using a Percent of Funds Substantiated report to measure financial integrity.
|
| Department of Education | To ensure that the schools that have not yet implemented the common record benefit from the experiences of those that have, the Secretary of Education should direct the FSA's Chief Operating Officer to establish a process for capturing lessons learned in written product or knowledge base and for disseminating them to these schools. |
Closed – Implemented
Education has developed a process to capture lessons learned and uses a variety of mechanisms to disseminate these lessons to schools that have not yet implemented the COD system.
|