Christmas tree permitting authorities and business process

Legal authorities

There are different types of authorities under which the Forest Service issues forest products permits for:

• Special forest products are things like beargrass, ferns, firewood, and other like items people may collect from national forests, including Christmas trees. Typically special forest product sales are entered into the Timber Information Management system (or TIM). Revenue collected from special forest products sales goes to various places (depending on the forest and product being sold). Funds can be collected through NFMA (routing back to treasury), TPBP (botanical products routing back to the forest), or for Christmas trees, funds could be collected under FLREA (routing back to the region and the forest) and or NFMA depending on the forest.
• FLREA or Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act authority allocates funds collected for certain permits back to the region and the forest. Some forests' Christmas tree programs are 100% under the FLREA authority, some are split between FLREA and NFMA, and others are just NFMA. Fees collected under this authority go straight back to the activities it was paid for, supporting the recreation program.

Open Forest

Open Forest Christmas tree permits will be sold exclusively under the FLREA authority.

Funds collected from Open Forest Christmas tree permits sales will be respectively distributed to the pilot forests under the FDDS36 code at a rate of 95% to the Forest and 5% to the Region.

Existing business process

At the moment, recreation fees are paid in Forest Service offices with this process:

1. Customer walks in to a Forest Service office. They pay via credit card, cash or check, processed via the Point of Sale System (POSS).
2. Customer receives a receipt or a tag, which serves as proof of purchase.
3. The Forest Service front desk staff reconcile the cash register and POSS daily. They deposit cash (through a convoluted money order-based process) and connect it with register transactions.
4. Forests and others can generate reports on sales, although it's not clear they do so often.
5. After the money winds its way through the Forest Service financial systems, it returns to the forest's accounts. They use it to deliver services similar to what the fees were paid for.

Open Forest Christmas tree process

In general, Open Forest will follow this, similar process for Christmas tree permit sales:

1. Customer goes online and pays for a Christmas tree.
2. Customer prints a Christmas tree permit on their printer.
3. The Open Forest system processes their credit card via Pay.gov, which, in turn, automatically passes payment information on to POSS. POSS can accept a limited amount of transaction meta-data via pay.gov.
4. Forests can generate basic reports about Christmas tree permit sales within the Open Forest program, through the administrative log in.
5. After the money automatically finds its way through the Forest Service financial systems (Pay.gov, POSS Central Office, FMMI), it returns to the forest's accounts. Forests then use that money to deliver services similar to what the fees were paid for.

During the Open Forest pilot, funds collected under FLREA can be tracked using this process:

• For purposes of the 2018 pilot the WO-CFO is manually settling transactions. WO-CFO department manually generates a “POSS Transaction Detail Report” weekly and sends that to the Product Owner. The Product Owner sends that report to the pilot region's finance and budget officers.

From FMMI Dashboard:

1. Budget officers can run a Billings and Collections report in FMMI: Run the report using Business Area FS00, choose your Unit (for example, Mt. Hood National Forest is 0606), select for FY2019.
2. Using the “FMMI Doc Number” from the “POSS Transaction Detail Report” the Forest can verify they have received the appropriate account deposits under FLREA.
3. The FMMI document number is confirmation that we got the P-number from POSS and that the payment has been processed.
4. A FMMI number may show up multiple times for multiple transactions because those transactions have been grouped/batched as they’ve been manually settled.
5. The sum dollar value of multiple matching “FMMI Doc Numbers” from the manually generated POSS Transaction Detail Report should match the total dollar value shown in the one Doc Number in the FMMI Billings and Collections report.
6. Transactions are manually being settled and may be settled individually or batched.

From POSS Central Office:

1. Forests can select REPORTS and run an Online Collection Report to see Application Name “FS ePermit Payments” data.

POSS item numbers for each Forest Arapaho & Roosevelt: 999900004. Flathead: 999900005. Mt. Hood: 999900007. Shoshone: 999900006. Deschutes: 999900008. Rogue River-Siskiyou: 999900009. Mt. Baker/Snoqualmie: 999900010. Okanogan-Wenatchee: 999900011. Willamette: 999900012. Umatilla: 999900013. Gifford Pinchot: 999900014. Fremont-Winema: 999900015. Ochoco: 999900016.