I have seen FCC "actions" go on for years and years and years.......
73
Jeff
Jeff,
That's because Federal statute [I can't remember off the top of my head which one] gives agencies of the US Government four years from the effective date of a matter [in this case, the date of a violation as determined by the Commission] to bring said matter to court for collection. The FCC has no collection powers and sufficient time has to be there for the Administrative process to run its course.
They have to allow the violator so much time to respond to the NAL, time for the Commission to review/affirm the NAL, issue a Forfeiture Order, give the violator a period of time to respond to the Forfeiture Order, review/rule on any response. That process can last up to a year and a half. Generally, they issue a final demand letter - which, in so many words, states that we intend to take this to US District Court to collect if you don't pay. That can happen anywhere from six months to a year later which, by that time, takes you to two years/a year and a half left to move forward. It seems like a lot of time, but remember that the same people who handle the FCC's real business - regulation of commercial/broadcast interests - have to handle all the other services as well.
If the ARRL truly cared about being a lobby for the amateur community - they don't; they're most interested in selling advertising to primarily the Big Three equipment manufacturers - they'd be lobbying for changes in the rules governing amateur radio, separating it from the remunerative services and calling for more common-sense regulations that are easier to enforce. It should be a lot easier for the Commission to simply revoke a non-remunerative radio service license without having to go through process of issuing a monetary forfeiture.
Instead they're wasting their time with an already doomed Bubba-enforcement regime that relies on amateur radio operators making their own recordings and targeting people they dislike, headed up by a guy who seriously didn't know what Simplex frequencies were Simplex frequencies, and actually believed that IDing using phonetics was somehow a violation.
We needn't talk about his disgraceful retest nonsense - which, let's be honest, he had no actual authority to engage in, at least the way he did.
By the way, how many actual investigations were conducted into "rogue" VE programs, hm? How much evidence of "rouge" VE activity was ever actually discovered? How many VEs were disciplined? And all those people who were forced to retest - one or two out of hundreds, if not thousands of people who took tests from those suspect VEs - were they ever given an apology for the inconvenience of being forced to retest with no violations proven to have occurred?
Those were all rhetorical questions, if it wasn't clear.
73!
