Filing deadline still unannounced

The Commission has adopted its final schedule of Regulatory Fees for 2009. You can find the new fees listed in Appendix C of this Report and Order. (Since the R&O – including its nine appendices – runs to 68 pages, it may be helpful to point out that Appendix C appears at pages 21-23 in the PDF version you will find when you click on the link.)

The new fees are, with one exception, the same as the Commission proposed last May. We described those proposed fees here. The sole exception is the fee associated with AM CPs. Here’s a surprise: the final fee ($400) turns out to be $80 less than the FCC had originally proposed!

The only real change this year is that electronic payment of all reg fees must be started through the FCC’s Fee Filer system as of this year. The Commission recognizes that some folks may not be able actually to pay through the Fee Filer system. (For example, the fees for some licensees may exceed $100,000, and credit card payments in such amounts may not be a happening thing.) But at a minimum, everybody is supposed to start at Fee Filer because that will enable them to generate a voucher Form 159-E which, the Commission assures us, “will have important electronic attributes associated with this regulatory fee payment.” With very limited exceptions, anyone not paying their fees through Fee Filer will need a voucher Form 159-E to accompany their payments.

Accessing the Fee Filer system requires you to have a current FCC Registration Number (FRN) and associated password. If you don’t have an FRN, we would be happy to help you work through the CORES system to get one.

As it has done for the past five years, the Commission will again send out “assessment notifications” to all broadcast licensees, advising them of the reg fees associated with their primary licenses. But, also as in past years, those notifications will NOT include any necessary fees for auxiliary licenses. This is important to remember, because even though auxiliary fees don’t show up on the FCC’s notifications, such fees are still required to be filed – and a failure to file even the weeny little $10 fee for, say, a remote pickup unit can result in “red light status” affecting all your licenses.

We expect the deadline for reg fees to be announced shortly.  Check back here to CommLawBlog.com for updates.