Client Alert

2011 Regulatory Fees due September 14

August 15, 2011

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The FCC has announced that regulatory fees for the 2011 Fiscal Year are due no later than Wednesday, September 14, 2011. Its Fee Filer system is now accepting fee payments.
 
The payment process must begin through the Commission’s on-line Fee Filer system, which may be accessed at http://www.fcc.gov/fees/feefiler.html, by entry of a FCC Registration Number and password. Payment may then be made on-line with a credit card, by mail or by wire transfer.
 
This year, for the first time, the FCC will not mail notifications to each licensee, as it had done in the past. Rather, it will be posting the information on a fees search page, which is not yet operative. When it becomes available, the fees search page may be accessed at http://transition.fcc.gov/fcc-bin/callsign.pl. Based on previous years’ experiences, we assume that the FCC search page display will not include broadcast auxiliaries, for each of which an additional $10 fee must be paid. However, auxiliaries for which fees were paid in the past year should appear in the Fee Filer account.
 
Please note that the FCC is still basing its service population estimates (upon which both AM and FM fee categories are determined) on the 2000 US Census. Therefore, unless there had been technical changes in the year prior to October 30, 2000 that extended or reduced predicted service contours, fee categories (although not the amounts) should be the same as in previous payment years.
 
We will be contacting our clients who have indicated a desire to be notified when FCC regulatory fees are due. If you know at this time that you would like assistance in preparing your forms and in the payment process, please let us know as soon as possible. Please note that we will be attending the NAB Radio Show the same week the fees are due, so to ensure timely payment we will want to complete the process by Friday, September 9.
 
If you have any questions, please contact John Garziglia, Peter Gutmann or Gregg Skall.

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