Because of the much shorter wait times it offers for the processing of NFA-related forms, the eForms system is the most celebrated accomplishment of the ATF in the last year (faint praise, given the unpleasant surprise of ATF 41P, and the generally anti-freedom mission of the whole agency). Unfortunately, as with other federal websites that are under construction, the eForms system has been plagued with difficulties, ranging from complaints about the unintuitive user experience to periodic system-wide outages.

Today, ATF sent out this mea culpa about the problems with eForms:

ATF eForms has been experiencing some severe performance issues for the past week.  Some of the symptoms the users are experiencing include slow response times, inability to finalize and submit forms, pay.gov screen not displaying, inability to view PDF’s, and the system abruptly returning the user back to the home screen. While some users report that they are able to successfully submit forms, others are reporting that they are not.

While our technology staff has been actively engaged in trying to resolve the issues, up to this point our efforts have not been successful.  We apologize for your inconvenience and your frustration.

We are hoping that we will be able to bring the eForms system back to its full operating capacity soon.  Once the operations have been restored and you find that you have form 1’s and form 4’s in your draft account that you cannot get submitted and you have paid your tax using pay.gov, please notify us using “Ask the Experts – NFA” and include the confirmation information that you received from pay.gov (that includes the Pay.gov Tracking ID).  Refunds are normally processed within 10 business day.

We are not taking this lightly. We assure you that we are doing all that can be done to come to resolve the issues.  We request your patience and understanding while we work this out.

Thank you.