FCC Proposes FY 2012 Regulatory Fee Reform

The Federal Communications Commission seeks comment on proposals to reform the FCC’s policies and procedures for assessing and collecting regulatory fees. This Notice of Proposed Rulemaking seeks comment on the issues related to how the FCC should allocate its regulatory costs among different segments of the communications industry.

In particular, we seek comment on:

• What the Overarching Goals of the Regulatory Fee Program Should Be. We propose three goals to guide our regulatory fee policymaking—fairness, administrability, and sustainability—and we seek comment on these goals and invite commenters to propose others.
• Regulatory Costs Should Be Allocated. Section 9 of the Communications Act requires that regulatory fees be derived by determining the number of full-time equivalent employees (FTEs) performing certain activities. We propose to change the way we allocate “direct” and “indirect” FTEs to calculate regulatory fees. The proposals on which we seek comment are based on aggregated bureau-level FTE data, and would allocate all FTEs in the Wireless Telecommunications, Media, Wireline Competition, and International Bureaus as “direct” and all FTEs in the support bureaus and offices as “indirect.”
• How Current Cost Allocation Percentages Should Be Revised. We then look at the cost allocation percentages that we use now and propose to update these percentages using current FTE data derived from the reallocation of FTEs described above. We set out the adjustments projected to result from these updates, examine the impact of these adjustments on the categories of fee payors, ask whether and how we should mitigate the impact of any substantial fee increases that would result, and ask whether any other changes are necessary to ensure an equitable result.