The Austrian regulatory authority for telecommunications and broadcasting, Telekom-Control-Kommission (TKK), has issued a consultation document addressing the payment of fees for regulatory supervision (to finance the TKK and the regulatory body RTR-GmbH), the Schwellenwertverordnung Telekommunikation 2006.

The consultation specifically concerns a threshold under which industry participants can be exempted from having to make such payments.

The regulatory authority is financed partly out of contributions from the industry it regulates, and partly from state finances. It has been established that there could be cases in which the payment of contributions would become too burdensome (e.g. because the activities of a particular company are comparatively insignificant in Austria). A threshold can be set by the regulatory authority in order to exempt certain parties from such contributions. These exemptions are based on a minimum turnover threshold.

A document describing the modalities of the calculation of fees has been published for consultation. The proposed threshold for 2006 is €315000, the same threshold as for 2005. The document (in German only) can be accessed by clicking here.

Only parties that are liable to pay regulatory fees in Austria may participate in the consultation. The deadline for responses is 2 March 2006.