Canceling Awards with Disbursements
Packaging does not contain any edits to prevent you from canceling awards for which you have already made disbursements for a student. After you cancel a student's award that has associated disbursed amounts, Packaging retains a record of those disbursements—including the associated disbursement plan/split code pattern. This causes a problem if you attempt to award the student a second instance of the same Financial Aid Item Type for the award period but use a different disbursement plan than the disbursement plan associated with the canceled award. Packaging cannot reconcile the disbursement plan for the canceled award that has been partially or wholly disbursed with the disbursement plan called for by the new award. This situation can occur for Financial Aid Item Types whether or not disbursement protection has been activated for that Financial Aid Item Type.
For example, you offer an original award of the honors scholarship for 1,000.00 USD to a student. All amounts in the following table are in U.S. dollars (USD):
| FA Item Type | Disb Plan | Split Code | Action | Award Amount | Disb Date | Scheduled Disbs. | Actual Disbs. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Honors Scholarship |
AT |
09 |
A |
1,000.00 |
Sep |
500.00 (50%) |
500.00 |
|
Jan |
500.00 (50%) |
0.00 |
You then decide to cancel the original award, and offer the student a 900.00 USD honors scholarship with a different disbursement plan. The following table shows the retained canceled award and the new award. All amounts are in USD:
| FA Item Type | Disb Plan | Split Code | Action | Award Amount | Disb Date | Scheduled Disbs. | Actual Disbs. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Honors Scholarship |
AT |
09 |
C |
0.00 |
Sep |
0.00 (0%) |
500.00 |
|
Honors Scholarship |
01 |
01 |
A |
900.00 |
Sep |
100.00 (11.1%) |
0.00 |
|
Oct |
100.00 (11.1%) |
0.00 |
|||||
|
Nov |
100.00 (11.1%) |
0.00 |
|||||
|
Dec |
100.00 (11.1%) |
0.00 |
|||||
|
Jan |
100.00 (11.1%) |
0.00 |
|||||
|
Feb |
100.00 (11.1%) |
0.00 |
|||||
|
Mar |
100.00 (11.1%) |
0.00 |
|||||
|
Apr |
100.00 (11.1%) |
0.00 |
|||||
|
May |
100.00 (11.2%) |
0.00 |
Packaging cannot reconcile the existing 500.00 USD disbursement from the canceled award with the new scheduled monthly disbursements of 100.00 USD.
The Validation process contains logic to prevent this situation from occurring. When you validate a student's award, the Validation process checks to see if multiple instances of the same Financial Aid Item Type with different disbursement plans exist. If this is the case, the Validation process then checks to see if the first instance is a canceled or declined award. If it is, the Validation process then checks whether the award has been disbursed, partially or wholly. If disbursements have taken place, then the Validation process cancels the second instance with reject message 9581, "You have a disbursed award that is either canceled or declined that contains a different disbursement plan than your newest offer."
The Validation process performs this check on both loans and non-loans. To award a Financial Aid Item Type under a different disbursement plan, you must first run both the authorization and disbursement processes to back out the row contained under the old disbursement plan. If you want to keep the disbursement plan, you can then award a second instance using the same disbursement plan.