Official NFA Transfer Times Thread

[Irish]

Waiting on my dealer from AZ to transfer to NV... tick.tick.tick...

[Steve-HSA]

My examiner was still working on his December "stack" last week....

[delta6]

My Examiner spends his Fridays at home. You have to call him on his cell. 2 months on a dealer to dealer transfer. I believe he came out of retirement to replace all the "young bloods" who were the new hires 2-3 years ago. That young crowd didn't have the "Washington, D.C." mentality. I knew a number of them and they went to work to get the job done, because they had higher asperations. Well, 2 years later, they have been promoted or transfer to better paying positions and the BAT folks had to hire many of the old crowd to fill those positions. So now it's...deja vu...all over again

[BVickery]

Sent my Form 1 off on monday, so I'm still an infant in the waiting game.

[mtk]

+1

Leave them alone...the more time the spend answering calls, the less time they spend processing forms.

Uh, no.

The folks answering the phone are not the same folks approving transfers.

I picked up my most recent Form 4 over the weekend.

Mailed on 12/27/08, went pending on 3/6/09, approved on 3/24/09, and received in the mail on 3/28/09 at my FFL/SOT.

[ron556]

honestly, 3-6 mos. is a heck of a lot better than waiting a year [my first SMG purchase]. but i am starting to see a trend… as others have stated, i know their volume has cranked up since the new admin. it can only get slower, i guess. damn.

[JoshNC]

Transfer times are still better than they were when NFA Branch was up in D.C. My first two transfers were sent in simultaneously in 2002, a Colt M16 and Vector fullsize UZI. it took around 7 months!!! My examiner misplaced my paperwork and then tried to tell me that NFA Branch had never received it. I had the USPS delivery confirmation with the employee's signature who signed for it. Total fiasco.

At least nowadays you call NFA branch and can speak to someone who is polite and helpful. Back in the D.C. days you were lucky to ever get someone on the phone who knew what was going on.

[mtk]

And don't forget the worthless sacks of shit in DC who just shredded the ATF's copy of the paperwork, rather than doing their job and filing it. As a result of this, a few folks have had transferable machine guns turn into contraband because they couldn't produce their original copy of the paperwork and ATF's copy was now long gone.

Now as for transfer times, they seem to have stabilized somewhat. The timeline for my last approved Form 4 is shown a few posts up from this one. I have a few others in the system that I mailed out on 1/31/09 and those just went pending on 4/7/09, which is right around the same time lag it took for the one I mailed on 12/31/08. I expect these to be approved around the end of April.

With the current political climate, I was concerned that we were looking at an ever-increasing delay in processing. So far, it looks like it's running a little over two months to pending status and then another three weeks to get it approved. At least for my examiner.

Now if you want to talk about truly ridiculous transfer times, some of the Form 3 transfers I've been involved with take that cake. I bought a Quest suppressor and due to bad assumptions on mine and the vendor's part, I got the wrong can (he sent one with a black finish and I wanted a plain stainless finish; we both assumed the desired finish, rather than discussing it). The long and short of it is that it had to be returned to the vendor. The inbound Form 3 took all of two days to get approved. The outbound Form 3 took two months. This was all pre-election, so current workloads played no role in it.

Only in government can you take a two day job and turn it into a two month job and still keep collecting a paycheck.

Now I will say that the gentleman answering the phone at NFA Branch is at least a good sport about it. When I called to check on the 4/7 pending batch, on finding my third transfer in the system as pending, he announced, "You've got the hat trick!"

[Mikey]

Just called today to check the status of my application I resubmitted early Febuary. They told me my paperwork wasn't even close to being looked at.

The guy asked me to call back in six weeks.

This combined with the application I sent in in November that got lost brings me to six months waiting.

[Abiqua]

Just called today to check the status of my application I resubmitted early Febuary. They told me my paperwork wasn't even close to being looked at.

The guy asked me to call back in six weeks.

This combined with the application I sent in in November that got lost brings me to six months waiting.

OUCH!

The Form 1 I sent in 26 Jan went pending 09 Apr. What's the hold up?