Federal Reports

Our objective was to describe the extent to which the Federal Student Aid office (FSA) identifies individuals who belong to underserved communities and performs outreach to those identified individuals. We found that FSA provided general outreach to individuals, some of whom were part of underserved communities, and reached such individuals through several FSA offices and through its partnerships with different organizations. Although FSA performed outreach through various methods, its outreach was constrained by its limited ability to identify underserved individuals. Specifically, FSA’s direct outreach was provided to its current customers and the Free Application for Federal Student Aid collected only limited demographic information that could be used to identify applicants as individuals from underserved communities. Consequently, FSA could improve its outreach to underserved communities by evaluating its outreach practices, coordinating outreach efforts amongst its different offices, and utilizing demographic data to identify and conduct outreach to individuals in underserved communities.

Pursuant to an Office of the Inspector General subpoena, we obtained Alaska Department of Health data that contained the personally identifiable information (PII) of 217,851 individuals the State recorded as deceased from January 13, 1900 to February 14, 2023. We processed thedata through the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) Enumeration Verification System and against SSA payment records and identified 119 beneficiaries in current or suspended payment status whose PII matched that of deceased individuals in the Alaska death data.