Minutes

Wireless Taskforce Meeting

June 27, 2001

Raleigh, NC

I           Welcome and Introduction

            Will Rice and Gerald Johnson, the Taskforce co-chairs, welcomed the attendees. The following persons attended the meeting.

II.             Public Comment

Paul Morris, of the Utah Telecom Task Force asked for permission to attend the meeting as an observer. Permission was granted. Mr. Morris explained that local governments in Utah are interested in the presenters’ capabilities of assigning numeric codes to their taxing jurisdictions.

III.       Approval of Minutes of April 25th Teleconference

Minutes of teleconference of 4/25 were distributed to attendees. Approval of the minutes of the April 25th teleconference was deferred until every one of the state attendees had an opportunity to read the minutes.

IV.       Discussion

The co-chairs reminded attendees that the mission of this task force as stated in the Mobile Telecommunications Sourcing Act (MTSA), is to approve a format for a database that will match addresses, in standard postal format, to the proper taxing jurisdiction(s). The group decided that it would deal with:

  1. ANSI Timelines and Task Force Timelines: Jonathan Lyon (FTA) described the ANSI X12 meeting and balloting procedures. He informed the group that any proposal seeking new data elements, data segments, or transaction sets, or changes to existing ones, must be submitted at the October ANSI X12 meeting. Balloting on the proposal would occur at the February 2002 meeting, and final approval would occur at the June 2002 meeting.

    Matt Tomalis (FTA) explained that the timeline in the MTSA is flexible. If the state provides all service providers with a database and data, the service providers have six months to implement the data and database. If a nationwide standard, approved by the FTA and MTC, is provided, the wireless companies have 18 months to incorporate the data into their software. There is no federal law or other federal impediment if a state wants to put a system in place before August 2002.

  2. Existing Geographic Coding Systems: The question was raised whether the Federal Information Processing System – 55 (FIPS-55), a geographic coding system that already is ANSI X12 approved could be used; i.e., does it list all taxing jurisdictions, and is it accurate? Martin Sohovich, of Group 1, explained that the FIPS-55 system, while useful, is limited because it did not adequately handle STD. Existing FIPS-55 codes would have to be appended to accommodate STD. The group was informed that appending a STD code to a FIPS CODE would create a new X12 data element and new X12 elements must be attached to an existing X12 data segment or group of data elements.

    Will Rice (WA) distributed a handout depicting the multijurisdictional combined tax rates that could exist in any county. Any standard numeric coding system would have to be able to accommodate a multi-layered tax system. Gerald Johnson (FL) stated that FIPS Codes as they exist now might be able to uniquely identify any particular taxing jurisdiction, but does not uniquely identify when tax is levied by overlapping jurisdictions. Eddie Washington (TX) stated that TX collects sales tax for its local governments and has a unique method of identifying these governments (non- - FIPS).

V.        Vendor Presentations

Martin Sohovich presented for Group 1 and for New Horizons.

Dick Eppleman and Mark Masucci presented for VERTEX.

Ed. Note. The providers requested that the minutes of this portion of the Task Force meeting be limited to the name of the presenter and the presenter’s affiliation because proprietary material was presented. The Task Force granted this request.

The Group recessed for lunch after the presentations.

VI.           Presentation of Prototype of Geocode

Jonathan Lyon explained the prototype (“Strawman”) showing the correspondence between Florida’s geocode format and the data elements contained in the X12 dictionary. Gerald Johnson suggested that the database could be made more manageable if the name text could be eliminated. He claimed these would be superfluous as long as the unique numeric identifiers were included.

  1. Tasks and Process:

  2. Timeline:

  3. Next Meeting of Task Force

The Wireless Sourcing Task Force will meet again on August 15, 2001 at the WestCoast Grand Hotel at the Park 8:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M. For further details, please consult the FTA website.