Magazine

Electronic Signature for Master Promissory Note, Education Department

December 1, 2001

ach year, almost 9 million students come to the Education Department's Office of Student Financial Assistance seeking help with paying their tuition. SFA administers $54 billion in new loans and grants each year, a mammoth amount typically requiring long paper trails of complicated forms.

SFA has long enabled students to file a Free Application for Federal Student Aid online. In June, SFA made it possible for students also to obtain loans and make payments without ever touching a piece of paper by using electronic signatures. "We reengineered the entire system from front to back to be a paperless process," says Greg Woods, SFA's chief operating officer.

In setting up the system, SFA had to comply with the 1998 Government Paperwork Elimination Act and the 2000 Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act to ensure that e-signatures would be considered legal by lenders such as Citibank and Wells Fargo. "We knew how to do e-signatures technically," Woods says. "We had to secure a commitment from our lawyers to back up and enforce these electronic processes." Woods says this project constitutes the first true use of electronic signatures in the federal government.

NEXT STORY: Firstgov responds