OMB Approves Lifeline Order Minus Two Contested Provisions
The Office of Management and Budget granted emergency approval for most of the information collection requests in the Lifeline order, but not before the FCC removed two provisions from the emergency request. Information collection related to the temporary address reverification rule, which requires reverification of a subscriber’s address every 90 days, and the requirement for a biennial audit for all recipients of more than $5 million annual support were removed. “FCC may re-submit these removed collections for OMB review at a later date after further consideration,” the OMB wrote in its notice Friday (http://xrl.us/bm33ez).
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
Six companies had submitted comments to the OMB challenging some of the information collection provisions of the order. Rather than delay implementation of the entire order pending review of the comments, the commission removed the provisions from the request for emergency review, an FCC spokesman said. The agency will resubmit them later, when it files for non-emergency three-year Paperwork Reduction Act approval of the provisions already approved an emergency basis, he said.
An attorney for General Communications, which had asked the OMB to strike the two withdrawn provisions as violating the Paperwork Reduction Act (CD Mar 28 p6), said the bottom line is that those provisions won’t take effect until OMB approves them. “They certainly haven’t succeeded in getting themselves through the first toll gate,” said John Nakahata of Wiltshire & Grannis, which represents GCI. “They didn’t justify the need for these regulations. ... They seem clearly to have run into some sort of problem at the OMB.” The OMB had no comment.
On Thursday, one day before OMB granted emergency approval, the commission submitted a new “Supporting Statement A” to replace the supporting statement it submitted in March. The new statement eliminated reference to a rule that would have de-enrolled a subscriber from the Lifeline program for failing to respond within 30 days to an eligible telecom carrier’s attempt to verify the subscriber’s temporary address. The FCC had estimated that rule would have affected about 100 ETCs and up to 1 million subscribers, and would have taken about 2,500 hours of paperwork across all ETCs. The new statement also removed reference to a requirement that ETCs drawing more than $5 million annually from the low-income fund conduct biennial independent audits, which would have affected 24 ETCs at an estimated 600 total hours of work every two years.
Sprint Nextel, which filed comments on behalf of its affiliated company Virgin Mobile USA, took issue with the rule requiring re-verification of users with temporary addresses, arguing it was “adopted without proper notice or record, and the costs to end users and to service providers will outweigh any purported benefit.” Sprint estimated it alone could incur a one-time system development cost of $350,000, and $800,000 in recurring costs to comply with the temporary address rule. It also referenced “numerous valid policy reasons to overturn the FCC’s temporary address rule,” such as its concern that customers with temporary addresses “who may be experiencing substantial economic and personal stress” would be “de-enrolled by default” if they failed to respond to Sprint’s repeated requests for verification. Comments were also filed by CTIA, Smith Bagley Inc., Alaska Communications Systems and the Montana Telecommunications Association.