Sometimes when you upload a NIBRS file you might get a warning indicating that the file has possibly been submitted out of order:




This warning can usually be ignored.  For agencies with RMS systems, our expectation is that we'll get a file from them each month.  We don't care about the file name, or even the dates of the incidents contained in the file.  What matters, is the 6-byte submission year/month at the beginning of each record.  

The warning indicates that they are not uploading their files in order and that if on their RMS system they updated an incident in a later month, it might be overwritten with an earlier version of the incident. The warning can be ignored if you know that you are not sending the same incident in 2 different files.


This dates back to the days when the FBI was receiving magnetic tape with NIBRS submissions on it each month.  They wanted to make sure that the tapes were loaded into the system in the correct order.  They had a requirement that all records in the file are for the same submission period (essentially when the file is created).


This warning can happen when using the Incident Editor as Crime Insight Repository does not distinguish between files created by an RMS system or files created by our Incident Editor. If you are using the Incident Editor and you want to get rid of these warnings, upload the files in the same order they were uploaded on the test system, oldest to newest. If you don't upload them in order, then upload all the ones with the lowest number at the end, e.g. files ending in .02 before uploading files ending in .03. If you upload a file ending in .03 before uploading all the files ending in .02 you will get the warning for every file uploaded and ending in .02. 


When this warning happens, the data is still uploaded to the reporting system and it is still sent to the FBI.

This can happen for the following scenarios

  • An agency doesn't upload a file with a certain submission year-month, e.g. the system was down for the month of September and their last submission was from August and their next submission is from October when the system is back up. 
  • An agency has missed submitting for a month and edits an incident, e.g. the current month is October and the agency has only submitted data up to August. If they edit the incident using the Incident Editor then the submission month/year of the incident will be October and they will get a warning
  • An agency uploads data for October and then uploads data for August. This scenario should be avoided if possible as it could mean that you are changing newer data by re-submitting older data. Please make sure this is not the case. If it is the case, please submit your files again the correct order.