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USAC Announces New Payment Quality Assurance Initiative (PQA)
Message Posted August 18, 2010

The SLD has just announced a new initiative called the Payment Quality Assurance assessment program (PQA) which is designed to gather specific information from applicants in order to calculate the rate of improper payments, a requirement under the Improper Payments Information Act (IPIA). Previously, the improper payment rate was calculated based on the full-scale, on-site IPIA attestation audits that many applicants found incredibly burdensome and time consuming. Unlike the attestation audits, the PQA initiative is designed to be conducted entirely online and should only take a few hours to comply, rather than several weeks.

USAC has indicated that only 20-60 PQA audits/quarter will be conducted nationwide and at the present time, applicants are selected purely at random. The PQA request is sent to the entity's contact person via e-mail and is based solely on a single invoice (BEAR or SPI) that was submitted to and paid by USAC. Applicants will have 10 business days to submit the following documentation:

- Audited financial statements (to verify that the applicant doesn't have an endowment of more than $50 million). Other forms of documentation may be accepted.

- Technology Plan Approval Letter (for services other than VOIP and basic phone services)
- All vendor invoices associated with the BEAR or SPI that is the basis of the PQA request. (Note: They are not asking for copies of cancelled checks.)

- Letters of Agency (if a consortium application)
- Signed Confirmation Letter

Applicants then can expect to receive the results of their PQA assessment within 90 days of submitting the information. Although they are not technically called 'audits,' they should be treated as such because if an improper payment is discovered, USAC will then recover those funds. The larger E-rate program compliance audits are expected to resume in February 2011, although they will be conducted almost entirely off-site and are not expected to resemble the previous IPIA attestation audits.

In all, I don't believe that applicants will find the PQA process to be overly difficult or time consuming. And considering the trade-off to the previous IPIA attestation audits, the move to PQA should be seen as a welcome advancement.

For the SLD's full announcement on PQA, visit: http://www.universalservice.org/fund-administration/about/program-integrity/pqa-program.aspx

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me at jtschell@comcast.net.

-Julie

717-730-7133 - o
717-730-9060 - f
jtschell@comcast.net
www.e-ratepa.org
Penn*link

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