Students who applied for financial aid in Louisiana may be worried to find that the company in charge of storing their personal information recently lost a large amount of financial aid data. Actually, a loss is the best-case scenario, the worst being embezzlement. The Louisiana Office of Student Financial Assistance (LOSFA) tried to assuage student fears by stating that the missing information was compressed and that special software was needed to access it—hopefully they’re not exaggerating the advanced technology of zip files.
Thousands of current students and college graduates (going as far back as 1998) could be affected by the loss. Among those at risk are any students who submitted a FAFSA in the state of Louisiana and out-of-state students who sent the form to a college within the state. Those who have a Louisiana College Savings account (START Saving Program) and those who have applied for or received a Tuition Opportunity Program for Students (TOPS) scholarship—a Louisiana-based scholarship—may also be affected.
The information was lost on September 19, 2007, and although search efforts were initiated from the onset, the data has not yet been recovered. Colleges are now informing the public of the incident, and LOSFA has posted additional information on its site. According to LOSFA, the public was not notified earlier to avoid misinformation about data that was misplaced rather than lost. The non-misplacement occurred when the media storage company was loading the backup data into a truck. Social Security numbers and student names were among the missing data.
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