The new Notary Public rules are back in the news. Their implementation date has been pushed back (again) to May 15. And one previously ambiguous area of great interest to the Registry of Deeds and its users has now been clarified. Here’s what the revised order says: “Failure of a document to contain the forms of acknowledgment, jurat, signature witnessing, or copy certification set forth in this Executive Order should not be the basis of refusal to accept the document for filing, recordation, registration, or acceptance by a third party.” Put another way, even if the notarization clause of a document does not meet the strict requirements of this order, we will still record it. That’s exactly how we had planned to handle such situations, but as I’ve written previously, the majority of Registers of Deeds had interpreted the order to mean that registries should refuse to record documents that did not strictly comply with the order. Hopefully this clarification from the governor’s office will put that view to rest.
