Downcoded
September 28, 20266 min readSubscribers

How One October Edit File Got Issued Five Times

CMS put the October front-end edit set out on April 16 and has rescinded and replaced it four times since, most recently this afternoon. The last two re-issues both land in the same segment of the claim status inquiry: two edits off by one element on September 18, eleven byte offsets off by exactly eight today. It takes effect Thursday.

At 1:54 this afternoon CMS posted the fifth version of a change request it first issued on April 16.

Transmittal 13977, Change Request 14429, the October 2026 front-end edits. Same subject line as the other four.

Effective October 1, implementation October 5.

The note on the face of it is one sentence: Transmittal 13967 of September 18 "is being rescinded and replaced by Transmittal 13977, dated September 28, 2026, to update the 276/277 flat file attachment."

We have been following this change request since August. Here is what moved in the fifth version, and what actually goes live on Thursday.

The Chain

Five issuances of one CR, all of them titled "October 2026":

  1. Transmittal 13742, April 16.
  2. Transmittal 13865, July 10.
  3. Transmittal 13934, August 27, adding business requirement 14429.8 and a 276/277 flat file with "COBOL PIC and typo corrections identified by the TCEDI team."
  4. Transmittal 13967, September 18, "to correct two typographical errors in the 276/277 Edits Spreadsheet."
  5. Transmittal 13977, today.

That is 165 days from the first issuance to this one, and three days from this one to the quarter it governs.

Requirement 14429.8 is the one to hold onto. CMS added it in August and it binds contractors to a specific document: "The contractor shall use the attached 276/277 flat file layout for the output file from the translator and for the input file for CCEM."

So the attachment that got corrected today is the contract between a MAC's translator and the module that edits what comes out of it. CMS has replaced it twice since that requirement existed.

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