After sending incorrect financial aid information to colleges and universities, the Department of Education has approved schools to process the faulty information so long as students‘ awards packages aren’t lower than they would have been with the correct information.

The errors may inflate the size of a student’s aid package, and thus create a false illusion of how much aid a student is eligible for. Advocates for financial aid administrators who are wary of the Department of Education’s approval claim that it could put them in a compromising position, prompting investigations led by future administrations that could cause problems for schools for accepting incorrect data.

“We want students to be able to get as much financial aid that they need if they’re eligible,” Emmanual Guillory, senior director of government relations at the American Council on Education, told the Hill. “We want that absolutely 1,000%, right? But at our institutions, this type of information is audited. You don’t want to be on record literally processing information that’s inaccurate, knowingly processing inaccurate information.”

Department officials made the suggestion Monday, releasing a statement that schools “may use their professional judgment to decide on a case-by-case basis, whether to proceed with the current ISIRs [institutional student information records] for FAFSAs when reprocessing is expected to increase students’ SAI [student aid index] and reduce financial aid eligibility, or to request that the Department reprocess any one or more of those FAFSAs.”

Guillory said that announcement puts financial administrators in a compromising position.

“It should never be their decision to choose between doing things the right way, which means actually processing the [forms] using the accurate data” or choosing the way that would give some students more money but forcing officials to say, “’We’ll just compromise everything that we’ve been told not to compromise,’” Guillory said.

The errors are expected to push back the timeline for award letters past April, and even past the May 1 deadline for committing to a school. More than 150 schools have already pushed back their decision deadlines in light of the stalls. Meanwhile, Department of Education officials said the majority of the problems for applications moving forward have been resolved.

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The Department of Education launched the new forms at the end of last December — two months past when the normal FAFSA cycle begins. Colleges were then told receiving financial aid would be delayed by a month.

Even error-free forms are expected to be delayed, as schools are unlikely to release aid packages until all forms are accurate.