freelawproject / pacer-issues

A place to discuss and track issues and improvements with PACER
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Provide clarity on the centralized fee waiver process #69

Open mlissner opened 4 years ago

mlissner commented 4 years ago

Describe the solution you'd like Currently the centralized fee waiver process is terribly broken. It works like this:

  1. You fill out a form and send it in.

  2. The AO reviews it and sends it along to judges

  3. The judges review the application and reply to the AO

  4. You never hear any results

In some jurisdictions, in step three, the item is docketed, but I've heard from numerous researchers that they were "just waiting to hear back from their application."

The multi-court waiver process was established in response to academics asking for it, but in practice the above makes it worse than the old system.

This should be better.