Recently I was contacted by a client who had, in years past, used a software package to make his own NFA trust.
He had successfully registered several suppressors using the trust but had run into trouble when he decided that he wanted to build an SBR.
If you are familiar with the process of building an SBR, I suspect that you can guess what the problem was. When you ‘manufacture’ an NFA item using a Form 1, you are required to engrave the name of the ‘manufacturer’ on the resulting NFA item (usually the lower if you are building an SBR).
When it is a trust that is ‘manufacturing’ the item then it is the trust name that is considered the ‘manufacturer.’ The problem this created is that the software package had, by default, named his trust something along the lines of ‘The John Andrew Pierce Revocable Living Trust of August 2011.’
That was not going to fit on his lower.
He contacted me to ask the question “Can I change the name of my trust?”
Unfortunately the answer is “No. At least not after you have already registered at least one other item in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record (NFRTR) with the existing trust name.”
In the end we simply formed a new trust to hold his future NFA items. But there are two lessons to be learned here:
- Choose the name of your trust carefully because it will be with you a long time.
- Think long and hard before using a software package or prepackaged forms to create a trust for ownership of items that can literally have criminal consequences if handled improperly.
