Payment of Filing Fees over the Internet
The U. S. Treasury is changing the way it processes credit card payments. The Website to which CM/ECF currently connects will be disabled on October 30, 2004; therefore, all courts which are using the Internet payment module must upgrade to Version 2.5 by then. The portions of the payment process that are a part of CM/ECF remain the same (except for minor modifications); however, there are now multiple screens for the U. S Treasury process. The first screen prompts for credit card information:Cardholder name, the first address line, and zip code default to the values shown in the CM/ECF utilities “Maintain Your ECF Account” and “Maintain User Accounts”. Attorneys should be made aware that 1) there is no verification of these values by pay.gov; and 2) changing any of these fields on the pay.gov screen does not affect
their CM/ECF data, so any needed changes should by made via “Maintain Your ECF Account".
Screen #1

When the attorney clicks the Continue button, a summary screen is displayed:
Screen #2

Attorneys must click the Authorization checkbox before clicking the Make Payment button.

If processing is successful, a receipt generated by CM/ECF is displayed; the receipt now has a link for printing, and the transaction number has a different format (if the attorney entered an email address screen shown above, he will also receive a receipt from Pay.gov).
Screen #3

Previously, the creditor search was case sensitive. Now, the application will ignore case when finding creditors matching the name entered by the user. Case is also ignored when the list of creditors is sorted by name; creditor name is now shown before creditor ID, and address information is displayed.

Previously, items on the Legal Research menu were links to other Web sites. When a user selected one of the items, he would leave the CM/ECF session and could not go back to it. Now, these items point to CM/ECF programs rather than to hyperlinks; when one is selected, a new browser window opens and the CM/ECF session remains. Also, an option for Lexis/Nexis has been added to the menu.

A Notice of Electronic Filing is sent to a user’s primary email address and to every secondary email address. A “free look” is given when the recipient clicks the document link in the primary NEF. Previously, one additional free look was given the first time someone clicked the document link in any of the secondary NEFs; thereafter, the user was billed. Now, a free look is available for the primary NEF and for each secondary NEF. To improve the performance of CM/ECF, the time period for a “free look” has been decreased to 15 days.

Billing transactions did not include enough data to make them unique; as a result the software used by the PACER Service Center software to process the transactions was incorrectly deleting some as duplicates. Also, more information has been added to the transaction receipt to provide users with better documentation of the data retrievals they have requested.