North American Electric Reliability Corporation; Notice of Staff Review of Enforcement Programs

Commission staff coordinated with the staff of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) to conduct the annual oversight of the Find, Fix, Track and Report (FFT) program, as outlined in the March 15, 2012 Order, and the Compliance Exception (CE) Program, as proposed by NERC's September 18, 2015 annual Compliance Filing. The Commission supported NERC's plan to coordinate with Commission staff to review the same sample of possible violations, thereby reducing the burden on the Regional Entities of providing evidence for two different samples. Furthermore, NERC and Commission staff agreed to exclude the Florida Reliability Coordinating Council Regional Entity (FRCC) from the survey, reducing the burden on FRCC as it focuses efforts on a planned and approved termination of its responsibilities as a Regional Entity. Commission staff reviewed a sample of 27 FFT possible violations out of 47 FFT possible violations posted by NERC between October 2017 and September 2018 and a sample of 37 CE instances of noncompliance out of 898 CE instances of noncompliance posted by NERC between October 2017 and September 2018.

Commission staff believes that the FFT and CE programs are meeting expectations, with limited exceptions. Sampling for the 2018 program year indicated that the Regional Entities appropriately included 63 of the 64 sampled possible violations in the FFT and CE programs, with only one exception, and that 62 of the 64 sampled FFTs and CEs have been adequately remediated, with the remaining two FFTs to be adequately remediated once the ongoing mitigation is completed in the coming months. Commission staff's sample analysis indicated a decreasing number of documentation concerns, particularly with regard to the clear identification of root cause in the FFT and/or CE postings. Specifically, the identification of root cause in FFTs and CEs has improved significantly over the past five years, moving from 38 percent missing an identification of root cause to all now being included in this year's sampling. Commission staff subsequently reviewed the supporting information for these FFTs or CEs and agreed with the final risk determinations for 62 of 64 samples. Commission staff also noted a significant improvement in the clear identification of factors affecting the risk prior to mitigation (such as potential and actual risk), and actual harm, which was identified in all samples. In addition, Commission staff noted that the FFTs and CEs sampled did not contain any material misrepresentations by the registered entities.