Department of Education (ED) operations and student aid program funding continue without disruption, even as a partial federal government shutdown enters its second week. The same cannot be said, however, for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), where agency contingency plans categorized income verification and transcript services as “non-excepted” activities, and therefore subject to disruption.
The “Get Transcript Online” and “Get Transcript by Mail” services have both been offline since at least the beginning of the week. NASFAA reached out to federal officials on Monday, but has been unable to determine whether these system outages are casualties of the federal shutdown or truly just part of a larger system maintenance issue. Additional services that require IRS staff processing will most certainly be delayed, if not discontinued, until Congress and the President reach an agreement to fund government operations. The IRS Data Retrieval Tool (DRT) continues to function, according to ED officials.