As universities across the country continue to issue reimbursements to students to cover services that have been stopped due to the coronavirus shutdown, the University of Connecticut has added another refund to the list. UConn Parking Services will now issue prorated refunds to students who purchased a university parking permit.
As reported by The Daily Campus, the prorated refunds will cover the seven week remainder of the spring 2020 semester, beginning from the official campus closure on March 16. The refunds will see students receive the money directly to the credit or debit card account that was used to purchase the parking permit.
The refunds are expected to be fully processed and distributed to students by May 15. According to the UConn Parking Services website, the credit and debit card refunds must be processed in batches due to financial regulations.
UConn is working with Global Payments, a third party company that provides processing services for credit and debit card authorization, on the refund initiative. Global Payments limits the number of refunds per batch that it processes. In total, UConn parking services believes it will take a few weeks to finalize all parking related student refunds.
“About 90% of all student parking permit purchases are secured using either credit or debit cards,” said Dwight Atherton, associate director of parking and transportation services, in a statement to The Daily Campus.
“Global Payments limits each batch of returns to 1,400 records. Parking and Transportation Services will ultimately process more than 8,700 credit card refunds to students,” added Atherton. “We currently expect that it will take Global Payments about a week to prepare each batch of refunds.”
For any prorated refund that cannot be assessed to a credit or debit account, the university will issue paper checks mailed to students’ home addresses. The paper checks are expected to take up to six weeks to process.
The parking permit refunds join UConn’s other reimbursement efforts that are returning unused room and board funds to students.
