The FCC’s junk fax enforcement is hindered by inefficient data ma...
The FCC’s junk fax enforcement is hindered by inefficient data management, the GAO told Congress in a report issued Wed. The GAO said the FCC is receiving many more complaints about junk faxes, but the number of investigations and…
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enforcement actions have remained the same. Complaints have risen from about 2,200 in 2000 to 46,000 in 2005, but the proportion resulting in citations has gone down, to 0.7% from 5.7%, the GAO said. Among problems faced by the FCC in dealing with the rising number of complaints is an unwieldy data management process, the GAO said. For example, the FCC’s Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau receives and records complaints in a database, and the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau (EB) handles the investigations and enforcement. But the Bureaus haven’t “coordinated their data needs” so EB analysts, sometimes unsatisfied with data available, “spend about half of their time on manual, redundant data entry.” Another problem: The EB considers only complaints with the junk fax attached, but the FCC’s consumer guidance on submitting junk fax complaint doesn’t make that clear, the GAO said. The FCC encourages consumers to include the junk fax, but doesn’t say “that without a copy of the junk fax, EB analysts do not review a complaint, include it in their investigations… or include it in their searches for repeat offenders.” The FCC should revise its guidance to consumers, develop better data management practices and should have “performance goals,” the GAO said. The agency said the 2005 Junk Fax Prevention Act required it to make the report. Unrelated to the GAO report, the FCC Wed. officially adopted rules to implement the 2005 junk fax law. The rules codify an exemption to the fax rules to allow transmission of fax ads to parties with whom a sender has an “established business relationship.” Wed. was the deadline for the FCC to adopt the new rules, which don’t deal with the enforcement issues raised by the GAO.