Cite as: 537 U. S. 149 (2003)
Opinion of the Court
gesting that assignment status may change from year to year. One way it may change is by correcting an erroneous assignment. Under the Act, an operator getting notice of an assignment has 30 days to request information regarding the basis of the assignment and then 30 days from receipt of that information to ask for reconsideration. §§ 9706(f)(1)- (2). If the Commissioner finds error, the Combined Fund trustees will fix it by reducing premiums and refunding any overpayments. § 9706(f)(3)(A)(i); see also § 9706(f)(3)(A)(ii). Nothing is said about finality on October 1, 1993, and no time limit whatever is imposed on the Commissioner's authority to reassign. The companies concede, as they must, that the statute permits reassignment after October 1, 1993.
The companies do, however, try to limit the apparent preference for accuracy by arguing that one feature of this provision for reconsideration in § 9706(f) implicitly supports them; this specific and isolated exception to an otherwise unequivocal bar to assignments after the statutory date suggests, they say, that the bar is otherwise absolute. Again, we think no such conclusion follows.
First, the argument is circular; it assumes that the availability of the § 9706(f) reconsideration process with no time limit is an exception to a bar on all assignment activity imposed by the October 1, 1993, time limit of § 9706(a). But the question, after all, is whether the October 1, 1993, mandate is in fact a bar. Section 9706(f) does not say it is, and nothing in that provision suggests it was enacted as an exception to the October 1, 1993, date. It has no language about operating notwithstanding the date specified in § 9706(a); on the contrary, it states that reassignment will be made "under subsection (a)," § 9706(f)(3)(A)(ii). But if the authority to reassign is contained in § 9706(a), then § 9706(f) is reasonably read not as lifting a jurisdictional time bar but simply as specifying a procedure for an aggrieved operator to follow in requesting the Commissioner to exercise the assignment power contained in § 9706(a) all along. In the com-
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