FCC Advises AM and FM Broadcasters Not to Pay 2024 Regulatory Fee Payments Pending Resolution of System Errors

Earlier this week, the FCC opened CORES to accept FY 2024 regulatory fee payments and announced a payment deadline of September 26, 2024.  Since that time, however, broadcasters have encountered a number of issues when trying to pay their fees.  The most common issues include:

• Difficulty accessing the system
• Assessment of inaccurate fees
• Failure to assess fees for all stations associated with a licensee’s FRN
• Stations being listed in incorrect service categories (e.g., a TV translator being listed as a full-power TV station, and vice versa)
• Fee-exempt stations being listed as feeable

The FCC today acknowledged that incorrect population count information in particular is resulting in incorrect fee assessments for a significant number of AM and FM stations.  In response, the FCC has temporarily deactivated the fccfees.com lookup site and has also added the following notice on the CORES log-in page:

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.

Accordingly, AM and FM broadcasters should hold off on generating their fee reports or submitting regulatory fee payments to the FCC until this issue is resolved.  Other broadcasters would also be wise to pay close attention to the fees that CORES assesses for their stations to ensure that they do not under- or over-pay and that all stations are properly accounted for.  We recommend that you seek assistance from experienced FCC counsel if you encounter any of the issues listed above (or other system issues). As noted in our previous post, failure to pay in full can lead to significant interest and penalties (and efforts to recoup overpayments may be time consuming).