A.

Funding Commitments for FY2006 and FY2005

We plan to continue to issue funding commitments each week for FY2005 commitments.
FY 2006
Wave 001 04/26/2006 $126.4 million
Wave 002 05/02/2006 $33.2 million
Wave 003 05/09/2006 $44.0 million
Wave 004 05/16/2006 $37.7 million

FY 2005
Wave 044 04/20/2006 $6.78 million
Wave 045 04/27/2006 $98.6 million
Wave 046 05/03/2006 $8.1 million
Wave 047 05/10/2006 $12.3 million

B.

ABCs of E-rate Training Update

USAC will offer six 1-1/2 day training sessions during the months of September and October 2006. For more information and to register, click on the 2006 Schools and Libraries Training link on the main page of the website.

If a training session is full and you would still like to attend, you can sign up on the waiting list.

C.

Outreach for Selective Review and Form 470 Numbers

USAC has prepared a set of five Special Edition News Briefs for applicants undergoing Selective Review. These News Briefs are being emailed this week and will also be available through links in the May 19 News Brief and also on the website.

Before this year, Program Integrity Assurance (PIA) review offered applicants the opportunity to correct the Form 470 application number cited on a funding request. For FY2006 reviews, PIA at first did not include that question, and a number of applicants were denied for citing an incorrect Form 470 application number in Waves 1-4. PIA has now returned to the practice of contacting the applicant, and will re-review the applications already denied for this reason. On Monday, May 15, USAC sent a communication by e-mail to all contact persons and authorized persons on FY2006 Forms 471 and posted the same information on the website.

D.

Online BEAR Update

USAC continues to work on an online BEAR Form, with the goal of having it available for online filing and certification by this fall. More details will be provided as the project takes shape.

E.

Invoicing Update

Payments for the month of February totaled $121,654,073.15, against requests for $178M. In total, 6,605 invoices were processed for 1,375 service providers. This represented 29,880 lines in April with 96% being completed within 30 days. Only 0.16% of the lines paid were in process over 90 days. (That is only 48 lines out of 29,880)

Only 26 in-process lines were over 90 days. With 1,389 lines in process, those over 90 days comprise only 2% of the total.

Remember that proper support for reimbursement requests should be maintained and readily accessible. All forms filed should have a supporting customer bill which applicants receive to pay for their non-discount share of the cost of the goods/services. This customer bill should contain enough detail to clearly demonstrate the eligibility of the goods/services for which reimbursement is sought. The amount on the Funding Commitment Decision Letter (FCDL) is not a grant but rather funding earmarked for the items requested per the Item 21 attachment filed with the Form 471. The goods and services on the invoice should match those on the Item 21 to ensure efficient processing of reimbursement requests.

USAC is progressing on its project to implement the online Billed Entity Applicant Reimbursement (BEAR) Form 472. USAC has noted that a large percentage of applicants who submit BEARs do not have a PIN. In the near future, we will be communicating the means by which applicants can receive a PIN.

Additionally, service providers will need to keep their E-Cert status active to be assured that BEARs can be properly reviewed and certified. The E-Cert information is part of the Online Form 498 processing. USAC strongly recommends that you review this information on the website. This will prevent delays in the future when the E-Cert is used to log into the BEAR process.

Other

No additional items.

G.

General Questions Received by E-mail

1. There has recently been an incredible increase in the price of raw materials, specifically copper wiring, that is certainly affecting many Service Providers participating in the E-Rate program. Considering the long timeframe between estimating pricing for these projects and when the funding commitment decision is made (for Internal Connections), are there any concessions the SLD is willing to make to assist in alleviating some of the cost burden put upon us?

If we estimate these jobs at a much higher rate at the time of the e-rate application to account for price increases (that often times cannot be predicted), we may run a serious risk of not being awarded the project because of price and also not being considered "cost effective" by the SLD.

Some of the projects we are dealing with now were quoted to the customer back in the fall of 2004 and just recently received funding approval (approximately 15 months later!). We are now faced with losing profitability on these projects because of the significant increase in cost.

We realize that it is not SLD practice to increase a funding request after the application is submitted; but are there special circumstances in which this could be considered?

Unfortunately, USAC cannot increase the amount of a funding commitment.

2. If a school is approved for a pbx and the school does not have internet connections, what should it do in terms of CIPA certification on the 486? It doesn't need filtering and therefore doesn't have it but that is not one of the options.

PBX services are funded as Internal Connections, and entities receiving commitments for Internal Connections must be in compliance with CIPA. These entities must be able to make the appropriate certification on Form 486, Item 11 or Form 479, Item 6.

3. This is not a question but a suggestion for those on the last service provider conference call who want to have more than one person at their company receive electronic remittance statements. If you are using Outlook, the person who receives the notifications (who is on the Form 498) can set up a rule so that whenever they receive an e-mail from "disbursements@bcd.universalservice.org", it is automatically forwarded to whomever they want to designate. Go to "Rules and Alerts" under the Outlook Tools menu. We have set it up this way so that when the general contact receives a remittance notification, there are two other people in the company who also receive the information. This is a fix until (if) the Form 498 is ever modified to designate more than one person.

This is a great suggestion, as USAC does not currently have a way to notify more than one person.