This hold will not affect your registration process, financial aid amount, BAH or Book Stipend. It is just a preventative measure to ensure that your VA payment is accurate and to prevent any student debts to the VA.
BASIC INFORMATION/SUMMARY:
-Chapter 33 Post 9/11 GI Bill Students ONLY
-Method to prevent VA Overpayments and Debts
-Also prevents refunds of College Opportunity Fund (COF) WHICH CANNOT BE REFUNDED TO STUDENTS.
-DOES NOT AFFECT BAH or BOOK STIPENDS
-Only a Tuition and Fee Refund hold from CU Denver
-Your financial aid will not be affected
-Only Affects you if you are expecting a refund
-Can only be removed when there is a refund in your student financial account
-Can be removed instantaneously once your refund is ready to be dispursed
-Will be replaced once you have been refunded to prevent future overpayments or COF Payments.
EXPLANATION:
This specific refund hold was put in place via recommendation from the VA, in order to get students on the Post 9/11 to check with us before they receive any sort of tuition and fee refund from their university account. The reason for this is that there has been over $150,000 in overpayments at UCD for the Post 9/11 GI Bill tuition and fee payments since the fall of 2009, caused by errors in reporting, the VA paying incorrectly or when students change their schedules.
Many times the VA does not inform students of debts, they just start recouping the money from students monthly BAH payments. We have seen students lose an entire semester of BAH payments because of an unknown debt to the VA, so we have placed the refund hold on the specific Post 9/11 GI Bill accounts to proactively catch any over payments and prevent any debts, because it is much easier to do this before the fact instead of after.
This will in no way affect your financial aid, but if you receive other awards that are strictly for tuition purposes, such as the College Opportunity Fund (COF), those awards cannot be refunded directly to you, and the VA pays after these types of awards are applied, so this refund hold is put in place to make sure that we catch these situations immediately, instead of on a delay, which causes the headaches with the VA overpayments and debts.
We realize that this does add an extra step in the refund process, and we apologize for that, but the good news is that we can immediately have the hold removed, so you should receive any refund the same day or the day after that you would have originally gotten it. Basically, we just want students to check with us before they receive any refunds from the school, so we can ensure that the refund is the correct amount and that the VA paid accurately, therefore preventing any future debts or losses of payments/benefits.
This is by no means a punitive action on your account, instead it is a preventative measure put in place to protect students from long term debts with the United States Department of Veteran Affairs. It is genuinely put in place to protect you and your BAH payments from any negative actions by the VA.
If you are currently expecting a refund, please let us know and we will remove the hold, immediately after we make sure that your payments and account are accurate.
That should about cover it for now. Please let me know if you have any other questions, comments or concerns. Thank you for your time and we look forward to speaking with you soon.