April 17, 2020

Funding Year (FY) 2020 FCC Form 471 Filing Window Countdown

The Funding Year (FY) 2020 application filing window will close on Wednesday, April 29, 2020 at 11:59:59 p.m. EDT.

TIP OF THE WEEK: Plan ahead to make sure you can complete all of your competitive bidding activities and certify your FCC Form 471 on or before April 29, 2020. If you miss this deadline, your form will be considered out of window, and you must request and receive a waiver of the filing window deadline from the FCC before USAC will review your application.

Commitments for Funding Year 2019

Funding Year 2019. The next Funding Year (FY) 2019 wave of Funding Commitment Decision Letters (FCDLs) is scheduled to run later today. As of April 17, FY2019 commitments total over $2.29 billion.

On the date that FCDLs are issued, you can access your FCDL notification from the Notifications section of your landing page in the E-rate Productivity Center (EPC).

CSB Extended Hours

We are publishing the extra hours the Client Service Bureau (CSB) will be open during the last five days of the filing window to allow applicants to take advantage of the opportunity to get answers to any last-minute questions.

CSB's regular hours are 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. EDT weekdays. In addition to those times, CSB will be open:

If an agent is not available when you call, please open a customer service case in EPC and we will respond as quickly as possible.

USAC System Implementations of Deadline Extensions

On April 1, the FCC released an Order (DA 20-364)* that temporarily waives and extends several E-rate filing and service implementation deadlines and provides all program participants an automatic 30-day extension to respond to USAC information requests related to pending appeals, invoices, FCC Form 500 requests, audits, and Program Integrity Assurance (PIA) requests. A list of affected program and response deadlines can be found in the April 3, 2020 SL News Brief.

EPC is set up to automatically send out notices for USAC information requests on a fixed schedule following customary program deadlines. While you may continue to receive the automated deadline notifications for such information requests, including the typical seven-day, 15-day, no response, and 24-hour response turnaround messages in EPC, rest assured that we are not moving to deny any of these forms or requests due to non-response or incomplete responses. We will instead continue our attempts to contact you, and when you are able to respond, we can continue our review.

For manual reviews of invoices (FCC Forms 472 and 474), we will also not reject invoices for non-response. Note, however, that the legacy system will continue to reject invoices that fall under one or more automatic rejection reasons – for example, if the Funding Request Number (FRN) is not featured on the FCC Form 471, or the service provider is not featured on the FRN. For errors like these that can be corrected, you can simply submit a new, corrected invoice as you have in the past.

* Note that the text of this Order has been updated by an Erratum (DOC-363678) released by the FCC on April 13, 2020. The updated text accounts for those situations in which an applicant from a funding year prior to FY2019 already received an extension of the service implementation deadline for non-recurring services or special construction, and that deadline falls in 2020.

Filing Window Tips for First-time Filers

Below are some tips for first-time filers. Keep them in mind during these last two weeks of the FCC Form 471 application filing window.

Logging in to EPC as a new user

After your account administrator or CSB has created you as a new user, you will receive an email with instructions on how to log in for the first time. You can watch a video on this and other basic EPC procedures in the E-rate Productivity Center (EPC) section of the Videos page on the USAC website.

However, if you have been created as a new user but you have not received your first email, you can go to portal.usac.org, enter your email address, and click "Reset Password." If you do not receive the second email inviting you to reset your password, contact your account administrator or CSB at (888) 203-8100.

The final requirement in the new user process is to accept your terms and conditions of EPC use. EPC will create a task for you to do this, which will be available in the Tasks tab of your landing page. You will not be able to take any actions – and your account administrator cannot update your user permissions – until you have completed this requirement.

Changing your account administrator

Your current account administrator can pass the account administrator role to another user on your organization's account. The E-rate Productivity Center (EPC) section mentioned above also has a step-by-step video demonstrating this process.

If you do not have an account administrator or the user currently assigned the account administrator role is not available, open a customer service case or call CSB for assistance.

Creating a contract record

If you have signed a contract, you do not enter the details of the contract in your FCC Form 471. Instead, you create a contract record in your organization's profile in EPC, and cite that record when you create an associated funding request in your form.

To create a contract record:

Log in to EPC.
From your landing page, click the link to your organization (the organization name after the "Welcome!" message or the first entry in the My Entities list).
Choose Contracts from the menu at the top of the page.
Click the MANAGE CONTRACTS button at the top of the page.
Click the blue ADD A NEW CONTRACT button at the bottom of the page.
Follow the prompts to provide the required information.
You have the option to upload a copy of your contract, which we encourage you to do. You will then be able to cite your contract on the appropriate funding request(s) in the FCC Form 471 without having to re-enter the contract information.

Updating entity profile information

Each fall, USAC opens an administrative window for applicants to make updates to their profile information. This is your opportunity to update information for your schools or libraries, such as contact information, urban/rural status, student counts or square footage, and school or library attributes.

The administrative window closes shortly before the FCC Form 471 application filing window opens, and the profiles are locked so that discounts for all entities will not change during the window.

If you have updates to make to your entities now, you can file a Receipt Acknowledgment Letter (RAL) modification to add this information after your FCC Form 471 has been certified. To do this:

• From your landing page in EPC, search for your form in the FCC Forms and Post-Commitment Requests section.
• Click on the form's Application Number to access the form.
• Choose Related Actions from the menu at the top of the page, then choose Submit Modification Request (RAL).
• Follow the prompts to locate the entity or entities you need to update, and provide the correct status. Remember that modifications that you submit will not immediately change the form, but they will be reviewed during the Program Integrity Assurance (PIA) application review process.

Adding or removing entities on an FCC Form 471

Adding or removing schools from a school district or libraries from a library system should be completed in the appropriate applicant organization profile while the administrative window is still open. Unless we can verify that the discount calculations for other entities will not change because you add or remove an entity, you should plan to use the RAL modification process described above to request these changes to your profile.

• To add a new school or library to your organization's profile, open a customer service case or call CSB in order to create the entity. While CSB can create the entity, they may not be able to link the entity to your organization's profile. However, you can use the RAL modification process to locate the entity and request that it be linked to your profile.
• To remove an entity, use the RAL modification process to identify the entity you want to remove.
• Note that consortia can add or remove members during the filing window. If you are a consortium leader and you are unable to do this, CSB can help you.
• To help with USAC's review of your application, you can also include information on adding and removing entities to the narrative section of one or more of the funding requests on your application.