[GunLawyer001]

This is the reality underlying the somewhat famous statement made by an ATF supervisor (I believe it was Gary Schaible), that the NFA Registry is not 100% accurate, but they will swear it is 100% accurate when in court.

Their spin on this is that the records require multiple checks, because of the problem that you cite; the computer distinguishes between zeroes and ohs, between the number 1 and the letter "l", between the letter z and the number 2. What you see on the receiver is not always what's in the Registry. Worse, the flunkies who entered the data over the years have often been semi-literate drones, who transpose letters and numbers in the serial numbers, the names of the owners, the manufacturers. Some of them even shredded documents so that they didn't have to do the work of processing them.

We have a serious problem when ATF has to implement formal procedures for checking for all the possible mis-spellings and typos, yet never hints at this to the jury when they swear that the item in question is not in the registry, so the defendant must go to jail. ATF is correcting it's registry during compliance audits, if the FFL isn't a problem and has the tax stamps, ATF assumes that it's legitimate, even when ATF has no record that it can find.

For individual citizens, however, if you lose your copy of the stamped & approved Form, and ATF has also lost (or misfiled) its record, then you're screwed.

This is what we get when we tolerate institutional perjury.