After you complete the FCC Form 471, a Receipt Acknowledgement Letter (RAL) will appear in your EPC News Feed. View your RAL by clicking the “News” tab at the top of your EPC screen, then in the search bar on the right, enter “RAL” to view all of your letters. Click “…More” to review the full letter in the News Feed.

The RAL confirms that USAC successfully received your FCC Form 471. Your service provider will receive a copy of the RAL, too. The letter provides a link to the form you just submitted, and information about how to make changes/updates to the form.

We’ll cover how to make changes and corrections to your form in a later post. But the main points of the letter are…

Double-check the information you listed

Make sure the information you listed on the form are correct. If not, correct it as soon as possible!

To review your form, scroll to the bottom of the receipt acknowledgement letter and click the blue button to the left (with the application’s nickname). Basic information about your form will appear. On the left-hand menu, choose “Funding Requests,” “Connectivity Information,” “Discount Calculation,” and “Entity Information” to review each of these parts of your form.

Navigation tip: You can also access and review your FCC Forms 471 by clicking the “Records” tab at the top of EPC, then selecting “FCC Forms 471”

To view your whole form as a PDF, select “Summary” from the left-hand menu and scroll to the bottom. In the “FCC Form 471 Generated Documents” section, click the link “FCC Form 471 Original Version,” and a PDF of the form will be downloaded in your browser.

Some errors are easy to correct, like contact information and clerical errors, by returning to the form and editing the fields. Others, like the service start or end date, require a formal process to update your form. We’ll go into more detail about how to make corrections to your form in a later blog post.

How to prepare for application review

The letter reminds you to gather documentation (proof) of the information you entered on the form. This includes but is not limited to:

• Your National School Lunch Program (NSLP) student counts (schools only)
• A list of entities receiving services
• Any calculations you made by hand, including Category Two cost allocations

And remember, program rules require you to keep the documents related to your funding requests for ten (10) years after the last date you receive services.

Reminders about important rules

The letter also restates some of the program rules you agreed to during the certification. This includes:

• Your service provider cannot give you, the applicant, budgeted funds to provide necessary resources as listed on your application.
• Work independently with your service provider to obtain the discounted products/services.

Links to the form, report, and entity profile

The bottom of the letter has links to more information about your application. You can review the form, view your school/library/consortium profile, access the funding request reporting tool (via the “More Info” section, to view many forms’ data at once), and add comments about this form for other users in your organization to see.

USAC recommends keeping a copy of the letter your records. To print it from the EPC News Feed, click on the date at the bottom of the letter, then use your browser’s print function.

After receiving the RAL, your funding requests enters the queue for application review. In the next post, we’ll talk about what to expect next.