Trust question

You do not send the original trust and you certainly do not have to wait for anything to come back before you send it in again. ATF will not send the copy of the trust back, just the approved form. (They might be nice and return an original trust if they recognized that's what it was and could get over the disbelief that anyone would send in their original trust declaration)

Send away!

If you want to SBR a rifle, SBS a shotgun, or make a sound suppressor you can still do it without too many problems if you have an electronic copy of your trust. Get on your computer and eFile it ASAP. After you get set up in their system, it should take 20 minutes or so to file. Plenty of tutorials on here and the web to help.

https://www.atfonline.gov/EForms/fa..._afrWindowMode=0&_adf.ctrl-state=184uzh340b_4


With the February date, your stamps should be coming back this month, or first of next month.

This site will give you an idea of the wait.
http://www.nfatracker.com/

hint, go click on the 'Stamp Received' header, wait a few seconds and click it again. That will sort all the stamps reported as received by the latest one in. Then you can look a few columns over to the left and see when they were sent in, if they were electronically filed, what they were, etc.

If that dealer sent in your original, you need to go slap him in the back of the head and ask him W.T.F. he was thinking.

Never ever, under any circumstances let that document out of your control!!


Plus I would find another dealer.


I hope for your sake you did not send in the original......................that may be bad, like contact your attorney bad.

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Your dealer appears to have no idea what he's doing. You can submit Form 4s for as many items as you want any time you want, you definitely don't need to wait until each item comes back. I've had up to 3 items pending at a time, all bought within about 2 or 3 months of each other. And I have many, many customers who do the same thing; it makes the wait times easier for sure.

And you definitely should never send in your original trust, that's for you to keep in a safe place. Always send in a copy since the ATF keeps it and doesn't send it back to you.

He's wrong.

You send a COPY of the trust. NEVER send the original.

And there's absolutely no reason to wait to send off new forms. He's wrong about that too.

Tell him an experienced NFA lawyer said so. He can e-mail me if he still doesn't believe you.

Aaron

It always annoys me when I hear about dealers who over-step their bounds when it comes to trusts. Those dealers aren't lawyers, and if a customer wants to send in their trust a certain way, the dealer should let them.

As a manager at a high-volume FFL/SOT, I'm well aware that I am not a lawyer, and neither is anyone else who works here. If a customer asks questions about their trust, I'll give them non-legal answers based on what I've seen the ATF approve and what I've seen them reject, but that's it. If I see the customer leave something out of a trust I'm familiar with, I'll point it out, but ultimately it's up to the customer to decide what gets sent in. If someone gives me a blank piece of paper and says that's their trust, I'll send it in with their paperwork. I'll point out that -- based on my experience -- their paperwork will probably be sent back for correction, but I'll still send it in. After all, I'm not a lawyer.

I have a customer who told me about how she bought a silencer through another dealer, and they refused to send in her paperwork because her trust wasn't notorized. Now, in WA state trusts don't have to be notorized, and her trust was a generic one that wasn't set up to need a notary. And it's a trust I've seen many people use and the ATF accepts it every time without a notary stamp. But this shop still refused to send in her paperwork even after she visited them several times protesting that her trust didn't need one. She ended up adding an extra page to her trust so she could have it notorized just so the dealer would send in the paperwork on her silencer.

He also thought we were supposed to send in the original trust and not a copy.

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Copy, not an original. The dealer is a total idiot if he said that.

FWIW, I have never had a dealer submit my paperwork. The dealer fills out the form 4 and signs it (both copies) and hands it to me. I sign, put my trust together, write a check and submit. Never had an issue.

Different dealers do different things I've found (Class 3 or not).

I had a friend that had a new Trust and bought two suppressors from a dealer (in stock, right at the shop) and when the dealer noticed he didn't have any property in the Trust yet, I had told my friend just to add the suppressors he just bought. The dealer claimed you can't add them because they haven't been "approved" (tax stamp back) yet. I said it doesn't matter that he can't take possession of them yet, they are legally his property since he paid for them. But he just added something else, we didn't get into an argument.

Ryanxia said:

Different dealers do different things I've found (Class 3 or not).

I had a friend that had a new Trust and bought two suppressors from a dealer (in stock, right at the shop) and when the dealer noticed he didn't have any property in the Trust yet, I had told my friend just to add the suppressors he just bought. The dealer claimed you can't add them because they haven't been "approved" (tax stamp back) yet. I said it doesn't matter that he can't take possession of them yet, they are legally his property since he paid for them. But he just added something else, we didn't get into an argument.

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ATF does not care if there is property in your trust or not.

It depends on the state. Some states require a trust to have property in it to be valid. The ATF uses a cheat sheet that lets them know basic state requirements.

yugorpk said:

It depends on the state. Some states require a trust to have property in it to be valid. The ATF uses a cheat sheet that lets them know basic state requirements.

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We need that cheat sheet. Apparently Michigan is not one of those states.

pjeski said:

We need that cheat sheet. Apparently Michigan is not one of those states.

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A FOIA request might produce results in 5 years or so

I filed my first NFA trust form 1 12 years ago. The examiner called me and had me add something to my schedule A so she could finish the paperwork.

The lawyer that wrote my trust made sure that the trust has $10 listed as part of the trust assets. My electronic copy shows it as Executed and has copies of the notarized signatures. Never had an issue with them finding an problem.

pdsmith505 said:

A FOIA request might produce results in 5 years or so

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I didn't say we needed ATF to provide the cheat sheet.

CraigC said:

Silencershop said they do not even need to see the inventory sheet.

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They shouldnt tell you that. Its all state dependent. Ive lived in states that it was required and states that it wasnt.

Like Yugo said, if it doesn't conform to State law then it's not a valid Trust and if it's not a valid Trust (i.e. a fake company) they aren't going to approve NFA items.

Has anyone other than Yugo actually had a trust rejected by ATF for not listing assets?

Does anyone know for a fact that the their trust instrument is not valid without property? And can cite the law that says specifically so?

The only place I have ever seen written that a trust must have property ($1) to be valid is on forums in NFA related discussions. And I have never heard a credible story of the ATF rejecting a trust for not having a list of assets. From any state.

I have had 3 suppressors and 2 sbr's approved over the last year and not once have I listed anything as being in my trust.