A Cautionary Tale

FRNs, CORES, ULS, TIN, ASR! Remember when all you needed to file an application was a typewriter and some whiteout.

The FCC, the agency responsible for managing the nation’s telecommunication policy, continued to use some rotary dial phones into the 1990s. Well, those days are over and it’s now joined the electronic age with a vengeance.

As everyone knows, the Universal Licensing System (ULS) is the FCC’s electronic filing system and database. Those who grew up doing paper filings may never adjust to it entirely, but, like most modern improvements, there are good and bad things about the new system. For example, submitting renewals and making administrative changes is a snap. Filing other applications can be confusing for the first- (or second- or third-) timer, but as with many tasks it becomes easier the more frequently you do it, at least until the next time they change the program. ULS enables the FCC to remind you when you need to file a construction notification or a renewal, and increasingly will allow them to “auto-grant” licenses eliminating the processing time that can kill a deal.

And if you’re trying to extract data from the FCC rather than inject data into it, ULS and the other electronic databases at the Commission are godsends. You can review your own and other’s people licenses with a click of your mouse instead of pawing through multiple file drawers only to find that the data isn’t there and can’t be located. You can research spectrum availability on a geographic basis. You can read comments filed by parties in rule making proceedings the day after they’re submitted.

So that’s the good news about the FCC’s brave, new, electronic world. The bad news is that when there’s a problem, unraveling it can be a maddening, time consuming, unbelievably frustrating process.

Anyone who does business with the FCC has horror stories about the early days of FRNs and passwords. Licensees rarely knew their passwords, and some even had been assigned by the FCC without notice to the licensee. Who knows why, but it was not uncommon for the taxpayer identification number or social security number not to match the FRN. That triggered a need to get on the phone with a human being at the FCC and convince them that you really were authorized to speak on behalf of the applicant and it was okay to reset the password, a process that could take days.

Most of those problems have been ironed out in the past few years. But the FCC recently added a new wrinkle to its electronic capabilities that anyone with an FCC license ignores at his or her peril.

The “Red Light” rule went into effect on November 1 st. It says that you will be denied a “benefit”, including a plain old Part 90 license, from the FCC or related organizations such as the Universal Service Fund, the Telecommunications Relay Service, or the North American Numbering Plan Administrator, if they determine that you’re delinquent in any debt owed to the Commission. The rule obviously is intended to prevent situations like someone who is collecting money from the Universal Service Fund without paying their FCC regulatory fees. If, for example, you try to renew a license and the FCC determines that your regulatory fees haven’t been paid, they’ll notify you of the debt and sit on the application until you pay up. They let you know about the problem by sending a letter that tells you how much you owe and the bill number and give you thirty days to settle up.

The system doesn’t sound unreasonable. After all, why should some company be getting payments out of the Telecommunications Relay Service, for example, if they’re not paying the FCC what they owe? The problem, as so often is the case, is not in the concept but in the execution, as demonstrated by the following cautionary tale.

A licensee operates a number of 450 MHz Part 90 systems. He’s been filing and paying for his applications and even paying his minimal regulatory fees each year and assumes he’s square with the Commission. But one day the FCC notifies him that they won’t process his applications, including some very time sensitive ones, because of a “Red Light” problem. And it’s a big one. The FCC’s letter informs him that his applications are on hold until he makes good on three outstanding bills, each in excess of $100,000, for a total of almost $400,000. The FCC letter lists the Bill Number for each, but they might as well be in Sanskrit. Since they aren’t his, the Bill Numbers mean absolutely zip and the letter gives no clue what they’re for.

Clearly there’s been a typo or other error that has associated some deadbeat’s delinquencies with his FRN. The letter provides both a phone number and an email address to which questions can be directed, but I think you know how this story goes. The phone number gets you to a very sympathetic woman who explains that she doesn’t have access to the data that would unravel the mystery of the bills. Essentially, she can only tell you what’s already in the letter. But she is happy to give you the real phone number for the group that supposedly can decode the bill information. Unfortunately, that number is on endless voice mail; no human being ever answers or responds to poignant messages for help. Email messages get no response either.

Now this problem, like most relating to government bureaucracies, will be resolved eventually. Someone at the FCC will be willing to work back through the process to find and correct the error and the licensee’s record will be expunged. In the meantime, however, his time-critical applications are not being processed. If he had known about the Red Light problem earlier, he would have resolved it, or at least tried to, before it impacted his business.

The moral of this cautionary tale is that you shouldn’t wait until you get a letter from the FCC to find out that you have a Red Light problem. Go to http://www.fcc.gov/redlight and see if your FRN shows up clean. If not, contact the FCC and get the issue fixed before you have an urgent need for one of those Commission’s “benefits.” Three minutes of your time now could save you a frustrating and expensive experience down the road.