Form R 7 Corrective Annexure Petition Frcap

Scope and purpose

Form R-7 Corrective Annexure Petition, conventionally abbreviated FRCAP, is a petition filed under the Seventh Concordance to compel the retroactive attachment of an annexure that should have accompanied an earlier filing but did not. It does not correct the underlying filing. It corrects the filing's silence, which the Office of Legal Residuary holds to be a distinct and more tractable defect than the filing's content. A FRCAP is therefore concerned less with what was said than with what was omitted from the record at the moment of saying.

The form was created in the wake of the 74-year Petition of the Ever-Recursive Spiral directed at the Department of Applied Metaphysics. The lengthy resolution of that petition is generally credited with producing the FRCAP as a workable instrument; the Department of Applied Metaphysics disputes this attribution on the grounds that a petition lasting 74 years is by definition not workable.

Structure of the petition

Form R-7 consists of four leaves. The first identifies the filing in need of an annexure, by reference number and floor of record. The second describes the annexure's intended content in a manner the form's instructions describe as "non-committal but not empty" — a standard that has generated more supervisory correspondence than any other clause in the document. The third leaf is reserved for the counter-signature of the office against which the petition is filed, and the fourth for that office's refusal, if refusal occurs. When the counter-signature and the refusal are both present, the petition is deemed heard.

The FRCAP is filed with the Office of Verification, which holds that it lacks jurisdiction to determine whether an annexure ought to have existed in the first place, and that this question is properly directed to the Office of Harmonic Measurement in cases involving translocated material, or to the Bureau of Precedential Inventory where the omission affects the order of prior claims.

The Loom dispute

The form's principal early test came in 312 A.R., when the Curators of the Loom successfully filed a FRCAP against the Office of Voluntary Correspondence. The Curators held that a shipment of unnumbered spools had been logged without the customary annexure of provenance, rendering the shipment unattributable for purposes of tithe. The Office of Voluntary Correspondence countered that the spools had been sent voluntarily and were therefore outside the scope of the FRCAP altogether, since the form's own preamble restricts it to "filings of compelled transmission."

The dispute turned on the word voluntary. The Curators produced a Third Concordance recension in which the term had been amended to cover "transmission where no counterparty has objected," and the Office of Voluntary Correspondence produced a later recension in which the amendment had been struck. Both recensions carry the same seal. The matter was settled in the Curators' favour by a two-clerk majority of the Sealing Board, whose reasoning has never been entered into the record and whose names appear on the minutes but not on any subsequent filing.

A related petition concerning the classification of certain brass keys, also pursued by the Curators of the Loom, was routed to the Office of Verification instead of the Office of Voluntary Correspondence; this routing is now cited as precedent whenever a FRCAP names two offices in the same sentence.

Interaction with other instruments

A FRCAP does not stand alone. Where the omission it corrects was itself caused by an earlier petition's failure, the filer is expected to have first sought relief through Form N-7R, the Retrospective Negation, or through the Petition for Precedential Recognition where the missing annexure would have altered the order of recognition. Filing a FRCAP before exhausting these avenues results in rejection under Form 9-B, which governs the correction of corrective filings.

The form also intersects with Form 44-U, the Petition for Probable Certainty, when the content of the absent annexure is itself uncertain. In such cases the FRCAP is filed provisionally, and the annexure's content is stated on the second leaf as a probability rather than a description. Three such provisional filings were recorded on Floor 1184 in the winter of 341 A.R., and all three were subsequently amended twice.

Notable filings

Besides the 312 A.R. Loom decision, the FRCAP has been invoked in the following recorded matters:

• A 298 A.R. petition against the Directorate of Volitional Integrity concerning an omitted annexure of intent on a Petition Form OVA-7D; the petition was granted, and the Declaration of Nominal Intent was deemed retroactively present.
• A 355 A.R. petition filed jointly by two scriptoria, concerning an annexure of witness signatures said to have been lost during a shelf realignment on Floor 612. The signatures were later found in Annex Alpha of Form Noc 4a Filing Instructions, where they had been filed as examples.
• An unnumbered petition from an unnamed petitioner, which the Office of Legal Residuary accepted for filing and then declined to number, on the grounds that numbering it would constitute an annexure.

Standing objections

The Office of the Quorum has repeatedly objected that the FRCAP permits a party to enlarge a record after the fact, which it regards as indistinguishable from retroactive amendment. The Seventh Concordance answers that annexures are by definition non-substantive, and that a filing may not be enlarged by an annexure, only completed by one. This distinction has been upheld in every challenge to date, though the challenge most frequently cited — brought by a junior clerk of the Office of the Quorum and recorded in the Scriptorium Affidavit — argued that the distinction rests entirely on the word completed, and that no two offices in the Tower agree on when a filing is complete.

Citations of the FRCAP in support of unrelated petitions have become common enough that the Office of Legal Residuary now requires filers to state, on the second leaf, whether the annexure they seek to attach "already exists somewhere in the Tower." Petitions answering yes to this question are referred to the Petitions of Apparent Isness, where they typically remain.