All,

BATF has apparently destroyed all of the records of its "March 1995 project 
to clean-up (review and amend) the entire National Registry."  I reproduced 
documents from this project in my 1997 Congressional testimony last year 
(see pages 98 to 106 of the printed hearing.

In November 1997 I requested via a FOIA copies of all documents relating to 
the March 1995 project, which by then was presumably completed--you might 
recall that NFA Branch Chief Thomas Busey referred to this "clean-up" 
project in his prepared speech on October 19, 1995, where he stated it was 
going to be necessary to manually verify all computerized data with the 
actual hard (document) copy, because the NFRTR was inaccurate ("It was fine 
to begin putting in everything accurate a year ago or at least be 
guaranteed a year ago it was correct, but what are you going to do with the 
entries that go back to the early '80s and the '70s and the 60s?").  

On May 21, 1998, I received a response to just one of the four FOIAs I did 
in October/November 1997, with copies of the rest of the FOIAs included 
without comment.  On May 29th, I wrote to the Disclosure Specialist asking 
for clarification, i.e., if the May 21st response was a complete and final 
response to ALL of my FOIAs in that group.  Today I received a letter from 
the Disclosure Specialist dated August 4, 1998, in which BATF confirmed that 
no other documents responsive to my FOIA on the March 1995 project were 
"retrievable."  I guess that means they have been destroyed or improperly 
classified--I mean, the BATF released the documents before, so how could 
these same documents be withheld now?

As the documents in my testimony show (thanks to the person who supplied me 
with them, who is on this list and may wish to remain anonymous for now), 
the BATF caused the "Significant Error" rate (see page 103) in the NFRTR to 
go down by merely redefining "Significant Error" as "Error" (see page 104). 
As the documents show, either term encompasses "approved wrong firearm to 
transferee" and "approved form never updated in NFRTR."  One way to lower 
the "Significant Error" rate is to call it something else so as not to refer 
to it by its previous accepted definition.

The "March 1995 project" generated at least 200 or so documents obtained by 
a previous FOIA by another individual, at the time the project was being 
worked on, and I sought merely to obtain the full record of it after it was 
completed.

Now, I'm not a lawyer, as you all know.  I would wonder out loud whether 
BATF destroying these project records might also have destroyed the 
evidentiary basis for some legal action(s) based on flawed records.  It also 
seems to me that if the March 1995 project did indeed "review and amend" the 
"entire National Registry," that legal chain-of-evidence requirements would 
mandate that any such records be permanently maintained.  If the NFRTR was 
amended in any way as the result of the March 1995 project, it seems to me 
that BATF has a legal duty to safeguard the basis for any such changes, and 
that these events would be fair game for discovery at trial.

Well, this is a long e-mail.  Enough said.  James Bardwell, if you'd like, 
feel free to post this on the NFA Web page.  At some point, this apparently 
flagrant destruction of what BATF terms "tax returns" needs to be remedied 
permanently by removing the NFRTR from the custody of BATF, relocating it in 
the Department of Justice, and actually punishing any federal employees who 
have deliberately destroyed these records in violation of the NFA and the 
Internal Revenue Code of 1986.

Eric