Tracking FY 2016 Application Status:
In the pre-EPC world, the status of any Form 471 could be found in the Apply Online section of the USAC website under Application Status. That status tool still works for funding years FY 2015 or earlier. It displays a table showing all Form 471s filed by an applicant for a given funding year. For each application, one of the following status conditions is shown:
Within EPC, FY 2016 application status is shown on an application-by-application basis as a progress bar on the individual application displays. The status portion of the application is clearly displayed, but appears to show less information. (We’ll know more as applications move through the review process.)
To find a specific application, start at the applicant page. Click “FCC Forms” in the activity column, and select “FCC Form 471” in the pull-down Category list.
This will generate a list of the one or more applications begun and/or completed by that applicant. To check the status of any one Form 471, click on the application number. This will display a one-page summary of the application and related contact information. The application status progress bar is shown at the top. The following application, for example, is shown as “Certified:”
As application review continues, the blue portion of the progress bar will move to the right. Occasionally, the blue bar may move left if, for example, an applicant responds to an inquiry (at the “Outreach” stage), and PIA is reviewing the response. “Committed” is the ultimate goal. We’re already seeing some applications at the “Wave Ready” point, presumably about to be approved in Wave 1.
The progress bar steps, from “Incomplete” to “Committed,” are not as finely granulated as in the older Application Status Tool. At some stages in the FY 2016 PIA process, however, additional “Review Status” information will be displayed just under the left-hand end of the status bar. The next step after “Certified,” for example, might be for the application to be placed in a queue for assignment to a reviewer — shown as:
The following is a less fortunate example. In this case, the application has reached the “outreach” stage, but the applicant has yet to respond.
Note that the application page displayed shows few details of the application itself. To see the full application, go to the bottom of the page and click on the “Original Version” link as shown below. Once the application is funded, we would expect to see another link to the “Current Version.”
Multi-BEN Contact Application Lists:
An individual EPC user, serving as the Form 471 contact for multiple applicants, can easily generate a list of applications for which the user is responsible. The trick is to start with the full list of Form 471s under the “Records” tab at the top of the page. Then click the “Yes” under the “Filed by my Organization(s)?” (Note: This same process can be used to develop a list of Form 470s filed for FY 2016.)
The “my” in this link, although not capitalized, is the most important word because the list generated is personalized by the EPC user login. Note that the resulting list of Form 471s shows only the Form 471 nicknames (each with an icon composed of the first two characters), not the applicant names or BENs — a good reminder that nicknames are important in EPC.
To see the status (as per the article above) of a specific Form 471, click on its nickname. Better yet, right-click on the nickname to open the Form 471 status display in a new tab. This will keep the personalized list of Form 471s intact.