Comment from Bishop Guilfoyle Academy
Bishop Guilfoyle AcademySupportIndividual
Summary: The commenter suggests that School Governing Organizations (SGOs) should be allowed to rely on schools to validate household income for Education and Training Tax Credit (EFTC) scholarships. They argue that using existing school tuition management systems would simplify administration, protect private financial data, and replicate a successful model already used in Pennsylvania.
An SGO should be able to rely on schools to validate household income level for EFTC scholarship recipients at their school if they use tuition management software or another process that validates household income via tax return and/or W-2 information. Currently, private schools use systems like FACTS, Blackbaud or STS (state of PA) for financial aid applications and awarding of the aid. These systems currently validate household income. At least some states (PA) allow SGO's to rely on schools to award the tax credit scholarships to eligible students and report the basic data to the SGO in order to actually receive the scholarship funds for the school to distribute. These reports include student name, hh income and other data and are sufficient to satisfy the audit needs for the SGO. The same process should be allowed for the EFTC program. It would simplify administration, prevent unnecessary sharing of private financial and other individual household data, and enables the federal program to use an already existing process that has proven to work in the state of PA.