Update on ATF NFA Process

With the New Year, the $200 tax on suppressors and short barreled rifles is eliminated.  In this episode we discuss how it is going so far.

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Transcript

0:14

Well, welcome to the live shoot podcast. My name is Jeff Dodo and I've been a licensed farm dealer for the last. 18 years. In this podcast we talk about all things related Second Amendment, anything else going in the world, a sports story, or anything else I might find interesting. So welcome, welcome, welcome. We are in 2026. Happy New Year, and I hope everybody had a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year. I took a little time off, but now we're trying to get back into it and. Today I wanna talk about the NFA suppressor process that kicked off on the first of this year. So, as you may or may not have been aware, as part of the big beautiful bill that was passed last summer the$200 tax stamp that was being charged by the A TF since. Now, 1934, whenever the NFA came into being the 200 tax stamp that was charged on suppressors, silencers short bail rifles short bail shotguns was eliminated. Now you still have to register those items, and that entails going through the E-forms process on the ATFs website, submitting your application. Photos fingerprint file, trust documents if you have'em and such and so, but all that has been put on hold because on January one that tax was being eliminated. So people have been kind of holding back, waiting for that to be eliminated and on January one, submitting them. And I too have been waiting to, to go through that process and hear how here's how it has gone. Not well. It has been a process. The system has been up and down, crashing overwhelmed. You try and submit, it doesn't go through. You Keep trying and keep trying and keep trying, and the system is obviously overloaded. And that is to be expected because this isn't the at s first rodeo. So again, I've been doing this 18 years. So in 2013 is when the E-forms process originally came out, and it was horrific. Prior to that, you would do all the paperwork submitted in duplicate, triplicate, attach. Pictures and fingerprint cards and mail it in to the A TF and wait a year to 18 months to get it approved and a physical document would be come back to you in the mail. In two, 2013, they came out with the E forms process and that was supposed to eliminate. All of that. And it was horrific, absolutely horrific. It would take days, and I literally mean days to submit one form. I would log in, I would get maybe five, six questions answered, and the system would go down. So he learned the old, you know, save as you go. So I kept saving, you, keep saving, keep saving, keep saving. And maybe after about three days, you would get all the way through the process of one form and eventually get it submitted. Now, once you got submitted, the turnaround process was imp was improving, but it was just absolutely painful. And in 2014, they shut down the application. They completely shut it down. There was some limited use for form ones because of the volume was, is not nearly as significant as the form fours, but they shut it down. Well, they did bring it back, I believe, at, you know, beginning of 2022. And it's, it's worked fine. And you know, over the last 18 months, the turnaround times had actually improved and things were going great, but. I knew everybody knew that this was going to be a catastrophe because of the amount of volume that was gonna be hitting the A TF. So I tried to be proactive and I went in and I, I created drafts and you can the, in the for application, you know, there's. Once you start one, it's a draft and then you submit it, it gets submitted, and then there you can look up all the approved and withdrawns and all that. So I created drafts of everything, and so I was gonna just come in on January one and hit submit on all of mine once the tax was no longer there. Well, when I log in on January one, there's nothing in the drafts. So not surprised. I'm not surprised. I thought that might happen. So I went in and I created my first one, and this was early on the January. I'm an early person and I got one through, went through pretty well. Then after that, nothing could not get anything submitted. So on January 2nd, I got up at three o'clock in the morning and got one submitted. And I still have some, and that I have not been able to get any submitted since then. I've got a handful left to submit and there's various errors, timeouts. I started a new form over for one and got the error to go away that I was getting for that same one, but it still hasn't submitted. So I tried to do that all this morning and nothing's happened so. I will probably log in early in the morning tomorrow and see if I can get the final one submitted, but again, hasn't gone well. And I can understand in my real life, I'm, I'm an IT guy and I can understand, you know, there, there's cost for performance and availability and. To add that level to support the volume, maybe what would be for a very short period of time, they're not gonna experience this type of volume that they're experiencing, you know, in this first month probably ever again. So do we wanna invest those dollars? And especially. For a government entity, if this was a company that your reputation and these, this is actually incoming revenue, this is not incoming revenue for the government, actually there's no revenue because we're not paying the tax anymore. Do we wanna invest those dollars? And I imagine a conscious decision in terms of what the amount of throughput the system could handle was made based on what the cost would be. And this was just something that people were going to, except because as dealers I have no other place to go. All I have to do is fight through it and just keep trying. And eventually I will get them all submitted either in a, the first week, it may take a month. Who knows? So I, I can understand it from an IT person's perspective, but from a user's perspective it's horrible. And but. No tax is being charged. It's, you know, when you do get one submitted it, it gets submitted. Now the next unknown is how long it's going to take to get them to approve these. And that's the big question because there is apparently a lot going through the system. And I still have some. From, for customers that haven't gotten me this, the information they need to submit for'em. So I've still got a backlog of suppressors to submit for approval pending some, you know, copies of fingerprints, photos, et cetera. So, you know, and I'm sure there's other dealers like that and, you know, who knows, wants. The word gets out and people actually start realizing the thing gets suppressors without paying. The 200 sales are probably gonna go up. I expect this to be a big year for suppressor sales this year. So more to come on that. But again, right now, just this is a quick update I wanna give you. Not going well. Not going well. And we will see. I will, I'll kind of try and keep you updated either in an upcoming podcast episode or just a part of an intro of one depending on how we go. But right now I've got some submitted. We'll see. Maybe I can give you an update next week. Hey, all of them got approved. Boom. They're already done. And I got everything else submitted or we'll see how it goes. Who knows? So I appreciate you listening. Take care and have a great rest of your day.