FCC OIG Shares Rodgers and Cruz Concerns About ACP Administration: Letter
The FCC’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) shares “many of the same concerns” top Republican leaders of the House and Senate Commerce committees voiced in early May about the commission's management of broadband money it received for the affordable connectivity program (ACP) during the COVID-19 pandemic (see 2305080067), acting IG Sharon Diskin told the GOP leaders Tuesday in a letter we obtained. House Commerce Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., and Senate Commerce ranking member Ted Cruz, R-Texas, sought information from the FCC OIG about ACP’s administration, citing ongoing debate about extending its life.
“I share your concerns” about the FCC not applying “lessons learned from prior program experience when the agency designed the ACP,” which Congress mandated as part of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Diskin wrote Cruz and Rodgers. When the FCC was drafting ACP rules in December 2021 “OIG submitted a number of recommendations for measures designed to prevent or mitigate fraud, waste and abuse in the new program, based on our extensive experience auditing and investigating problems in the Lifeline program" and the emergency broadband benefit program that preceded ACP. “Our goal was to prevent the recurrence of these problems by implementing preventative measures in the rules and policies governing the ACP,” she said: The FCC “adopted a number of our recommendations,” but “it failed to implement several important recommendations intended to enhance and safeguard” the program’s integrity.
OIG’s “ongoing 2023 ACP audit,” set for completion in November, aims “to determine the status of recommendations reported in prior OIG and GAO audits of” EBB, Diskin said. Auditors are assessing whether the “FCC adequately targeted vulnerable populations of unserved and underserved citizens for its ACP outreach and overall ACP program effectiveness." The audit will examine “whether the FCC developed effective program goals and performance measures to accurately report the performance results of the ACP, she said: It will also “evaluate the status of recommendations reported in prior OIG and GAO audits of” EBB “by seeking information from the agency and reviewing the agency’s corrective action plans.”
OIG “currently lacks a reliable source” of information to accurately assess how many ACP subscribers hadn’t adopted broadband before participating in the aid program, Diskin said. “We are not aware of any process to collect information regarding prior broadband access as part of the ACP consumer eligibility verification and enrollment process.” At “least one large group of ACP subscribers likely had broadband access prior to participating in” EBB or ACP, she said: Universal Service Administrative Company “data show that more than 5 million households enrolled in the ACP were verified based on Lifeline program participation. Beginning in 2016, the FCC adopted changes that expanded Lifeline to support access to broadband services and phased down support for voice-only service. To the extent that ACP subscribers were mobile Lifeline subscribers prior to May 2021, many had access to some mobile broadband service.”
Diskin said OIG previously told the FCC in January 2022 that only 22% of households eligible to enroll in EBB did so before the transition to ACP, in part because the commission “did not prioritize unconnected households” in its EBB order. The commission also “did not elect to use any of the $64 million in administrative funds made available” via the FY 2021 appropriations and COVID-19 aid omnibus package “for market research or targeted outreach related to” EBB, she said: OIG is currently auditing how the FCC is identifying low-income households that don’t already have broadband service, including the ACP Outreach Grant Program.
The FCC didn't comment.