◆ The Program for Evaluating Payment Patterns Electronic Report (PEPPER), CMS’s free compliance monitoring resource, is unavailable for unknown reasons. A CMS spokesperson told RMC that “CMS understands the importance of PEPPERs to the hospital community and is working to make them available again in the near future.” Ronald Hirsch, M.D., vice president of R1 RCM, said many hospitals normally use the early December PEPPER release “to formulate their compliance plans for the next calendar year. Add to that the lack of communication from CMS or the contractor on the delayed release and this becomes not simply an inconvenience but also a mystery.”