First, confirm you are on the right form. DA Form 7433 carries the official title PRIVACY ACT INFORMATION RELEASE STATEMENT, and you use it to privacy act information release statement. Second, check the edition: the copy offered here is dated 04/01/2009 and its publication status is ACTIVE. Third, size up the job — 1 page(s) and about 50 entry fields, so you can decide whether to fill it now or set aside time.
Now decide who does the writing. Normally you enter your own particulars, then hand the sheet to the unit administrative office for review. If you work in that office, you enter what the individual brings you. From there the path is the same for everyone: TIG is responsible for the form, and AR 20-1 tells you what triggers it and where it ends up. Look at the directive first whenever your case departs from the ordinary.
Start at the top of the page and work down. The heading blocks come first: write your name as it appears on your official records, then your identification number, then your unit or organisation, then the date you are preparing the form. Do not skip ahead to the interesting parts and come back — these heading entries are how your form is found in the file afterwards, and a form filed under a misspelled name is a form nobody can locate.
Now for the body. Use tab to advance through the fields; the order was set when the form was built and following it keeps you from leaving gaps. Check boxes and option buttons take a click. Where the options are mutually exclusive, choosing one will clear another, which is how the group is meant to behave. As you type longer entries, watch the field edge. One-line fields do not wrap, and anything past the edge prints missing even when you can still read it on screen — when that happens, put the text in remarks or on a continuation sheet. Leave nothing blank because it does not apply; enter the mark that means it does not apply, so the reviewer knows you read the question.
Save the signature for last. Sign by hand, or by whatever electronic method your office accepts, and understand that until you do the document is a draft no matter how complete it looks. If the form calls for a reviewing official, an approving authority, or a witness, take those signatures in the order the blocks print, and have each signer date it on the day they sign rather than the day you prepared it. Before you hand it over, read it once more from the top. You are looking for three things in particular: a mandatory field you left empty, digits transposed in your identification number, and a date written with day and month the wrong way round. Check one more thing if you built this form from a copy you had lying around — old entries survive in a reused file, and they will go forward as though you meant them.
You will find a Privacy Act statement on the form wherever personal information is collected. Read it at that point rather than skipping past it, because it tells you the authority for the collection, the purpose, the routine uses, and whether answering is mandatory. After you fill the form, remember that your copy contains personal data. Store it and transmit it as your office requires for records of that kind.
Download the form
Next comes the download itself. The formats available are PDF, XFDL, and you decide between them by asking how you will enter the information. If you plan to type, take the fillable pdf: the boxes accept keyboard input and you can save the result. If you plan to write by hand, take the printable pdf and run it through your printer while it is still blank. Both show the same published page, so the decision affects your method and nothing else.
After you download, open the file the right way. Double-click a pdf and your browser may take it, which is fine for reading but risky for filling: some browser viewers show you the fields, let you type, and then lose the text when you close the tab. Save the file to your computer first, then open it in a full pdf reader, and check that your entries survive a save before you type the whole form. If you downloaded the xfdl file, do not try a pdf reader on it. That format is IBM Lotus Forms, and you need the Lotus Forms Viewer to open it at all.
One last point before you move on: every format is free. No registration stands between you and the file, and what you download is the published form, unaltered.
What the form asks for
- CHECK1
- CHECK2
- CHECK3
- CHECK4
- DATE
- LABEL1
- LABEL10
- LABEL11
- LABEL12
- LABEL13
- LABEL15
- LABEL16
- LABEL2
- LABEL3
- LABEL4
- LABEL5
- LABEL6
- LABEL7
- LABEL8
- LABEL9
- LINE10
- LINE11
- LINE12
- LINE5
With the form signed, send it where AR 20-1 tells you to send it — usually to the office it names, or through your unit administrative channel, or straight into your own record, depending on why you raised it. Keep a copy for yourself before it leaves your hands. How long the receiving office holds it is not your decision or theirs; the records schedule for the series settles that, and local habit does not override it.
When another document has to travel with this one, find it by series and number. Forms in the DA series sharing a proponent or a governing directive are commonly used in combination, and anything cited on the face of your form generally goes with it. Assemble continuation sheets, covers and transmittals before you send the package rather than in response to a query.
Before you reuse a saved copy, look at the edition date printed on it. The proponent revises the form from time to time, and your stored file will not tell you when that happens — you compare its date against the current edition yourself. If a revision has come out since you last filed one of these, leave the earlier submission alone; the change does not reach backwards.
One last thing to be clear about before you download. What you get here is a copy of a published Department of the Army document. This site is not part of the Department of the Army, issues no forms of its own, and cannot tell you that any office will accept what you submit. Nothing written on this page is legal advice. When you are unsure about a particular entry, a requirement or whether you are eligible at all, ask TIG or the administrative office that services your unit — they answer those questions and we do not.
Questions and answers
- What is DA Form 7433?
- PRIVACY ACT INFORMATION RELEASE STATEMENT
- Which edition is current?
- 04/01/2009
- Who is responsible for this form?
- TIG
- In which formats can it be downloaded?
- PDF, XFDL, PDF
Publisher notes
- 42-ITEM ONLY PRODUCED IN ELECTRONIC MEDIA,