The FCC issued a Public Notice today, extending the date for the filing of the new Form 323 Biennial Ownership Report until January 11, 2010.  As stated in the Notice, the Commission has yet to finish testing the new form in its electronic filing system, so it is not yet ready to be used.  Given the delay (as we wrote on Friday, the Commission had hoped to release the form for use last week), the Commission’s Media Bureau decided to extend the filing date.  However, as we discussed in in more detail in our post last week, the substantive issues apparently have not changed.  Commercial broadcast station licensees will still need to have FRN numbers for all of their attributable owners – which can be obtained now as the FCC electronic registration process for the FRN is separate and apart from the Form 323 itself (this is the process that will involve submitting the social security number of all of your attributable owners).  So licensees should start that process now – as these forms will be complicated for many licensees to complete the first time around, and should not be something left to tackle in the first few days of the New Year right before the new due date.  

See last Friday’s post for more information, and links to our memo on the new Form and the FCC’s Frequently Asked Questions page.