FCC Recognizes Issues with Regulatory Fee Amounts in CORES Filing System: Asks Broadcasters to Wait to Pay Fees While Problems are Addressed

As we noted on our Blog earlier this week, there were reported problems with the system for filing annual regulatory fees.  Fee amounts in the FCC’s CORES system, where the fee payments are made, were not corresponding in some cases to the FCC’s look-up system for checking what a station’s regulatory fees were supposed to be.  In addition, many radio stations were reporting substantial increases in their fees, when those fees were supposed to be decreasing.  We had initially attributed the increase in fees to a change in the census data used, but it appears that this benign excuse was not accurate – instead the problem appears to have been with the FCC’s CORES database itself where the contours of many stations were computed incorrectly.  This improper calculation resulted, in most cases, adding more population to a station’s predicted service area and pushing the station into a higher fee tier with greater fees.  The FCC now appears to have admitted the issue – and it has asked broadcasters to hold off on paying their fees until the filing system is corrected.

It may be that Friday the Thirteenth was really bad luck for the FCC, as the Commission recently posted the following note in its CORES filing system:

NOTICE: The FCC is continuing to do its due diligence to reevaluate the population count information for AM and FM broadcasters for FY 2024 regulatory fees.  We expect to have this situation resolved early next week.  In the meantime, we request that AM and FM broadcasters do not make any payments in CORES.  Thank you for your patience.      

We expect that the FCC will be making every effort to quickly resolve this issue so that the fees can still be paid this month before the October 1 start of the new fiscal year.  And, thus far, the FCC has not extended the September 26 filing deadline for the fee payment.  Stay alert for more information from the FCC about the correction of this problem so that you can pay your fees quickly once the issues are resolved. 

Also be sure to check carefully all other information in the FCC filing system.  We are told that, in some cases, FM translators were listed as full-power stations, and that stations were listed as being exempt from fees that really were not.  There may well be other issues that arise as well.  Look carefully at your fees, make sure that all of your stations are included before you make your payment, and question anything that does not look right.