Improving Postal Addresses for USAC Letters:
Most USAC correspondence with applicants and service providers is now delivered electronically via email and/or EPC. Exceptions include BEAR Notification Letters — and importantly letters from the U.S. Treasury in the fortunately rare cases in which an applicant’s BEAR payment is reduced to satisfy an outstanding government debt — which are printed and physically mailed.
Applicant letters are generally addressed to the applicant’s general contact in the following format:
APPLICANT NAME (often truncated)
Contact street address
Contact city, state, ZIP
Normally, this is fine if the contact is an applicant employee. However, if the general contact is not an applicant employee, but is a third party (e.g., the applicant’s E-rate consultant) there is a reasonable likelihood that the mailing may go astray.
To avoid potential postal mailing errors when a non-applicant contact is used, we recommend that the contact’s organization name be added as a separate address line in EPC and, whether system-populated or not, in all E-rate forms. Fortunately, most E-rate contact forms include 2-3 address line fields, one of which can be used for a “c/o” the firm name. As illustrated below, USAC letters may still highlight the applicant’s name, but will at least include the contact’s firm name in the full address.
APPLICANT NAME
c/o Contact organization name
Contact street address
Contact city, state, ZIP