GAO Says FCC Delaying Rollout of ECFS Replacement
The FCC “pushed the deadline back” for developing a replacement for its electronic comment filing system (see 1909160019), GAO said in an April report released Monday. GAO included the FCC in a survey of Regulations.gov and other agencies’ electronic comment…
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systems. FCC officials informed GAO in February that they expected “the new system to be completed” by April but by that time “could not provide updated time frames for completion,” the report said. As of February, “they had developed system requirements and were obtaining leadership approval for them.” After a discovery phase in which the FCC would identify “system requirements that will help [the agency] improve the security and functionality of the platform,” the commission planned to “move to an implementation phase” that “will include awarding a contract for the project, developing and implementing the new system, and going live with the new system,” GAO said. Three ECFS user groups said “they generally find the platform easy to access and use for submitting comments on proposed rules” but said “the search function is challenging to use and does not provide relevant or targeted results,” the report said. ECFS “allows users to focus searches to particular categories of documents," but "officials from two of these user groups said that it is not always clear what some of these categories mean because they are not defined which can make it challenging to determine how best to search for materials,” the report said. The FCC didn't comment. GAO said last month the FCC has made progress addressing ECFS security vulnerabilities after the disruptions during the 2017 net neutrality comment period, but needs to do more (see 2004240029).