In prior years, the practice of the Legal Services Corporation ("LSC") has been to disburse grant funds in a fashion which resulted in grantees receiving their January and February grant funds together in a single check issued at the beginning of the grant term. Grantees subsequently received their March through December checks on or about the beginning of each preceding month, and received no grant check in the month of December.

           The purpose of this letter is to inform all grantees that this practice will be altered. As a result of competitive grantmaking, there have been recent instances in which some legal services programs ceased to receive LSC funding at the end of a grant year. In those instances, having received funding for December earlier in the year, the grantees and LSC were not in a position to ensure that funding for the month of December went toward fulfilling the grantees’ closeout obligations.

           Therefore, LSC has decided to issue monthly checks beginning on the first of the upcoming calendar year (2000). LSC will disburse grant funds in equal installments over a twelve month period. Thus, all grantees which are eligible to receive a full year’s funding will receive that funding in twelve equal disbursements at the beginning of each month of the grant year.