Originally Posted by chadknowslaw

Just as a follow up:


According to the agent, the FBI sends a report to the US Attorney's office for each inspection regardless of the results of the inspection. If there was a violation, then the decision is made whether or not to prosecute. What is very important to know is that the prosecution decision is made from the FBI Agent's report-- so if the report says "no violations" it basically ends. If the report says "there was this particular violation but the producer corrected the violation prior to the submission of this report" then, in my experience, no prosecution will take place. I know there are the attorneys that say "you will go to jail if you have ANY violation" but they are living in Fantasyland and are trying to scare you into hiring them. I do not care for that kind of behavior--people hire me because I come with good recommendations, not because I convince them to hire me. Maybe that is why I have only one house and drive a truck instead of a Mercedes??????

In my experience with federal prosecutors, they only take cases that are important. In the jurisdiction where I prosecuted, the federal prosecutors had a very high threshold for drug prosecutions -- a certain number of pounds of marijuana or a certain number of grams of cocaine, for example. The federal prosecutors passed on a case where a 17 year old brought a gun to school that I referred to them for federal firearms violation. That was an open and shut case but they declined to take it because they had more important cases to prosecute. You must understand that prosecutor's offices at every level have heavy caseloads and the federal court system in particular is under very heavy loads. Filing a criminal charge against a producer who did not have an ID on file but produced it 2 days later is not worth the time, effort and money it takes to prosecute a criminal case. There are serious drug traffickers, weapons traffickers, human slavery traffickers, and money launderers that are more pressing and involve real victims.

The Agent said that if you are making a good faith effort at keeping your records in order and you have all your ID's that the likelihood of prosecution is nil. He also said that if you meet those standards, he will not send a report of a violation to the prosecutors office, even if technically and under strict interpretation of the law you had violated the law.What the FBI agent basically said, and what I have said before, is that if you are going 58 MPH in a 55 zone you will not get a ticket. Of course, I am not the one in the driver's seat, I just give directions and try to warn of real dangers ahead.