Originally Posted by
tomgoodman
If the FAA has made a mistake, it’s important that your attorney take prompt action before the mistake ripens into a suspension of your airman certificate. The letter you received has raised the stakes, because while a DWI is not a violation of FARs, failure to report one usually is.
I have no idea how FAA security/medical conducts their investigations, only Flight Standards. As this is not a Flight Standards issue, my advice here is only worth 2 cents, but in the case of AFS (Flight Standards), we usually want to know if the information we have is incorrect so we can save having to write huge cases and send them to legal, which usually turns into a months-long process. If you feel more comfortable having a lawyer contact the FAA to do this, go for it, but be sure to explain the situation to the lawyer and try to get to the issue in question. I've seen many investigations where the lawyer threw up a huge "wall" that did no one good in the end, neither the airman or the FAA, communication can save both parties lots of time and wasted efforts. If I was on the other side, I'd want to see what the FAA "has against me", but the lawyers almost never ask for this. There's no reason to hide this, because again, it's going to go to court (potentially) in the end anyway. This process might require you to be a little tenacious with the lawyer. The legal counsel on the FAA side (like a prosecutor) is only at the very end of the legal process and they don't want to be handed a pile of crap at the end that they can't possibly take to court, there are supposed to be checks and balances in the system to prevent that and they generally do not want to send out notices of proposed certificate action (what you fight in court) that they cant win, again, it just usually does no one any good.
In the AFS world, we've generally moved away from enforcement cases like this and to Compliance Philosophy, except in very extreme cases, which usually involve a flight or flights with a long list of willful FAR violations or things like egregious reckless endangerment (stand-alone reckless behavior is very hard to prove, so it has to be pretty significant, like running drugs, trying to hit someone, etc.). FAA Security and Medical is not part of Flight Standards, so not covered under the same enforcement rules (at this time).