Billy's Law

Billy's Law or the Help Find the Missing Act

This act provides statutory authority for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to maintain the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) consistent with its existing purpose and structure.

NamUs is a national information clearinghouse and resource center for cases involving missing persons and unidentified or unclaimed remains. NamUs is administered by the National Institute of Justice within DOJ.

The act also establishes new requirements.

First, it requires a law enforcement agency that submits a missing child report to the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) to also submit the missing child report to NamUs. The NCIC is a computerized index of criminal justice data and files for reports of missing and unidentified persons. Current law requires law enforcement agencies to submit missing child reports to the NCIC database but not to the NamUs databases.

Second, the act establishes requirements to facilitate data sharing between the NCIC database and the NamUs databases with respect to missing and unidentified persons.

Specifically, the act requires DOJ to give the National Institute of Justice access to the NCIC missing person and unidentified person records for the purpose of validating cases and reconciling data with NamUs.

Additionally, the act requires DOJ to assess the NCIC and NamUs systems and governing statutes, policies, and procedures and create a plan for NCIC to automatically transmit certain records to NamUs.

Third, the act requires DOJ to report to forensic medicine service providers and law enforcement agencies on best practices for collecting, reporting, and analyzing data and information on missing persons and unidentified human remains.

DOJ must also report to Congress biennially on the status of the NCIC database and the NamUs databases. The report must describe the process of information sharing between the NCIC database and NamUs databases.

Written by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. All summary versions on Congress.gov