SHEFA administrator Henry Hofschneider said the 12 checks worth $24,000 were returned to the Department of Finance for cancellation.
During the SHEFA board meeting Wednesday, Hofschneider reported they received the incentive award checks last April.
Before they started disbursing the checks for fall 2010, he said they reviewed all applications after getting reports that some were ineligible to receive the awards.
“After going through each record, the office of SHEFA found that at least 12 applications should not have been approved for incentives based on noncompliance with the SHEFA rules and regulations,” he said.
In April 2011, the Division of Treasury released incentive checks in the total amount of $532,000 for the fall 2010 term.
Hofschneider said the release would have closed out the remaining awards for the fall 2010 term.
He said some students requested for the review of their records, claiming they were omitted from the lists of approvals for field of study and incentives.
“My second review resulted in finding at least eight applicants as meeting the eligibility requirements, one for grant-in-aid, three for incentive, and four for field of study,” he said.
The total amount of awards for the eight new approvals was $13,200, he added.
The total award for the fall 2011 was $2,344,700.
The breakdown was $965,200 grant-in-aid — for on-island students $457,200, and for off-island, $508,000; $847,500 priority field of study — for on-island, $436,500 and off-island, $411,000; incentives, $532,000 — for on-island $286,000, and off-island, $246,000.
On April 14, Hofschneider said the finance department informed SHEFA to submit a list of spring 2011 awards worth $588,000.
He said he submitted the request on the following day, including the list which contained all spring 2011 approved grant-in-aid, field of study and approved incentives.
The balance remaining on the total incentive awards was about $78,500, he said.
“Depending on the outcome of my second review of applications that I still have to look at, the total spring 2011 amount of award, currently at $877,000 might jump slightly,” he told the board.
He said he is not expecting the increase to be more than $100,000.
SHEFA, he added, has about 25 more applications to review.
These were pulled out from the batch of incomplete applications after SHEFA received supporting documents in the mail, he said.
He said the documents were postmarked before the Feb. 28 deadline.
