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E-rate Filing Deadlines for 486s and BEARs
Message Posted June 28, 2002

Several districts have inquired about deadlines for submitting their 486 and 472 (BEAR) forms. Below is an excerpt from an E-Rate Central article that does an excellent job of explaining the various deadlines. Have a good weekend!

Geoff Craven
Central Susquehanna Intermediate Unit on behalf of

Julie Tritt Schell
Office of Educational Technology
Pennsylvania Department of Education

 

* E-Rate Filing Deadlines (Supplied by E-Rate Central)

Deadlines have become one of the most confusing aspects of the E-rate
program. There are now deadlines for Form 470 postings, contract awards
and vendor selection, Form 471 applications, Form 486 certifications,
Form 472 (BEAR) invoices, provision of services, appeals, and responses
to SLD information requests.

In the course of any given year, an applicant may be subject to 5-10
separate deadlines. Miss any of these deadlines and funding may be
denied or reduced. Some of the deadlines are fixed, well publicized,
and apply to all applicants. Others, more confusingly, are applicant-
or FRN-specific. They can be 7, 28, 30, 60, 90, or 120 days after
certain trigger dates that depend on when a given applicant was funded,
started or finished receiving services, filed a form, or was otherwise
notified. Only a few of these deadlines are publicized by calendar day
references. Most must be calculated by applicants on their own. Often a
single deadline will be based on multiple trigger dates and use the
latest date calculated. Until recently, much of the information on
deadlines was buried in boilerplate SLD correspondence and was either
not available or difficult to find on the SLD Web site.

To correct this problem, the SLD established a separate "Deadlines"
subsection in their Web site's Reference Section (see
http://www.sl.universalservice.org/reference/) with initial documents
covering the following three subjects:

(1) Service Delivery Deadlines and Extension Requests: The deadline is
June 30th of the funding year for recurring services and, generally, the
following September 30th for non-recurring services. This subsection
describes the conditions under which non-recurring services deadlines
can be extended or checked on a FRN-by-FRN basis,

(2) Form 486 Deadlines: For the upcoming year (FY 2002), the Form 486
must be postmarked no later than 120 calendar days from either the FCDL
funding date or the Service Start Date, whichever is later. For
applicants funded in Waves 1-5 (i.e., before June 30, 2002) for
recurring services beginning July 1, 2002, the Form 486 filing deadline
is October 29, 2002.

(3) Invoicing Deadlines and Extension Requests: For the current year FY
2001 and the upcoming year FY 2002, BEAR invoice forms must be
postmarked no later than 90 calendar days after the Service End Date or
the Form 486 Notification Letter date, whichever is later. For
recurring services in the current year, ending June 30, 2002, this
generally means that the BEAR filing deadline is September 28, 2002.
This SLD subsection also discusses conditions and request procedures for
extending invoice deadlines under special circumstances.

Be careful: With reduced staff coverage in July and August, and a hectic
start of the school year in the fall, it may be difficult for applicants
to file all of the necessary BEARs by the September 28th deadline.
While the SLD may ultimately decide to extend the deadline beyond the
current 90 days, we recommend that schools and libraries begin working
on FY 2001 BEARs as soon as possible. As with all SLD filings, it is a
risky strategy to wait until the filing deadline to submit a form that
might be rejected (with no time remaining to make corrections).

The SLD also took this opportunity to establish special Form 486 and
invoice deadlines for applicants that had been funded during the
out-of-the-window period of FY 1999 or late in the FY 2000 funding
cycle. Although the normal deadlines for these periods had passed, the
SLD set new filing windows recognizing that adequate notice had not been
previously given. Applicants needing to file Form 486s or BEARs for
these funding years should read the SLD instructions carefully. One
critical deadline is September 1, 2002.

For those seeking help in calculating applicant- or FRN-specific
deadlines, we offer a hint and a tool.

Hint: The best way to determine, for example, the 120-day deadline from
a specific date is to use a simple Excel formula. Enter the trigger
date (e.g., 7/1/02) in cell A1 of a blank Excel sheet, then use the
formula "=A1+120" in a second cell. The result will be the 120-day
deadline (e.g., 10/29/02). This is a much quicker and safer method than
trying to count 120 days on a calendar.

 

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