Prison Calling Paperwork Burden Estimate ‘Laughably’ Low, Providers Say in PRA Challenges
The largest inmate calling service (ICS) providers submitted Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) challenges in response to the FCC inmate calling order. That order required all ICS providers to submit information about their costs to provide interstate, intrastate toll and local service, and associated costs for interconnection fees, equipment investment and forecast data. Annual reporting requirements would add 101 hours per year for each ICS provider to respond, said the FCC. In comments to the Office of Management and Budget, ICS providers called the estimate unrealistically low.
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"The Commission has grossly underestimated the amount of time it will take ICS providers to comply with the data collections,” said Global Tel*Link. GTL serves 1,900 correctional facilities, it said. “Even if GTL spent only one (1) hour per correctional facility to collect, compile, and formulate the many data categories required by the Commission (which is an unrealistically low estimate), GTL would spend 1900 hours per year to comply with the annual reporting requirement.” GTL would also need to hire staff just for this data collection requirement, it said. “The Commission should reevaluate the burdens and benefits associated with the new information collection requirements adopted in the Order and FNPRM and take guidance from the conclusions reached by the Commission for eliminating such cost justification requirements in the 80s and 90s."
"Every data collection requirement is challenged under the PRA, and such efforts almost never succeed,” said Andrew Schwartzman, co-counsel at the Institute for Public Representation, which is representing prisoners and families intervening on behalf of the FCC’s rules. “This is certainly to be expected here, because the ICS companies have resolutely refused to provide any data to the commission amid indications that these companies are wildly profitable,” he told us. “One would think if the data were to show that the ICS companies are struggling, they would be happy to provide proof."
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has stayed much of the prison calling order (CD Jan 14 p3), including regulations justifying and authorizing collection of cost data, ICS providers said. “Because the Commission cannot legally impose cost-based rate regulation or require the detailed annual reporting of cost data at this time, the mandatory collection of such data is not useful and, thus, incompatible with the PRA,” said Telmate in comments posted Thursday (http://bit.ly/1jSWvE2). That’s reason enough for OMB to reject the data request, it said. The commission’s mandatory data collection also “makes no effort to reduce the burden faced by ICS providers,” Telmate continued. “It does not seek consistency with existing reporting and recordkeeping practices; it is unmoored from any plan to analyze the collected data; and, it ignores less burdensome but statistically significant alternatives."
No. 2 ICS provider Securus had similar complaints. The data collection covers requests that the D.C. Circuit has stayed; it lacks “practical utility” in violation of the PRA; it’s “extremely burdensome”; and it seeks documents not maintained by Securus, it said in comments posted Thursday (http://bit.ly/1iEJlLw). Securus will need to break down “joint and common costs” in each of the 1,800 correctional facilities it serves, from among the 650 services it provides, it said. “The FCC’s time and cost estimate for the data collection is laughably low” -- too low by a factor of 766 for Securus, it said. Securus President Richard Smith estimated the cost studies requested will require more than 41,000 hours and 31 new employees, at a cost of nearly $2 million. The “Separations Study” would require another seven employees at a cost of $420,000; and the cost forecasts would require six new employees at $360,000. “The data collection imposes a tremendous burden,” Smith said in an attached declaration.
Nor does the FCC have the resources to review the “enormous set of data that it purports to need according to sitting Commissioner Ajit Pai” who “sharply criticized” the order in his 20-page dissent, Securus said. It’s a “mystery” how the FCC could process all the requested information without becoming “its own Bureau of Prisons,” Securus said, quoting the Pai dissent.
"If the commission succeeds in imposing cost-based regulation, it certainly has the power to collect the data to enforce those rules,” Schwartzman said.