Ethics, The Golden Rule...and the Notary Signing Agent

Notaries have all been approached by the last minute Loan Officer, Mortgage Broker and the occasional Escrow Officer who wants to get the deal done in a hurry. You get through all the preliminaries about the signing. Name, Address and Phone, and you've agreed to a price for signing the package and know the deadline. Then comes "Oh, by the way..." or "There's just one more detail..." and it always has the smell of something foul. Then they proceed to ask you to back-date, or fudge your invoice or some other act that would force you to ‘color outside the lines'. Our response to some of these requests has varied over the years, but we now have it down to something fairly simple: "I'm sorry, we just don't participate in those activities as this is how we make our living and wish to continue doing so". I used to react with more outrage but the type who makes such a request never really gets it, so I stopped. You know what happens then, they say "well we have to have this done today, so thanks anyways" and on they go to some poor newbie notary willing to do fraud for $100.

Sometimes I’m forced to explain that I'm unable to notarize as the document indicates a name which the signers ID does not support. You'd think the client might commend me for my due diligence right? Wrong. He looks at me in disgust and shakes his head like I'm pulling a tooth. Or, how about the one we hear all the time? We fill out our journal and instruct the lady to sign her name once for each notarized document. "That's ridiculous!" She said. "I get notarized all the time and I only sign the book once". I'm forced to explain that I can't possibly know why others wouldn't follow State law which requires one journal entry for each notarization. She still looks at me like I have three heads. Another, every day happening is being laughed at… Every time I ask a person to raise their right hand and swear an oath when executing a Jurat they grin or ask "you're kidding right?" I have to keep a straight face and say "No, I'm not". One guy even told me "I didn't do that much when I got married".
Hey! CA Notaries: Did you administer your oath today?

8214.1. The Secretary of State may refuse to appoint any person as
notary public or may revoke or suspend the commission of any notary
public upon any of the following grounds:.......

.....(k) Failure to administer the oath or affirmation as required by
paragraph (3) of subdivision (a) of Section 8205.

I made up my mind, long before entering this line of work, that my work had to represent integrity. In order to do anything well, you have to be able to sleep at night. The hardest challenge a Notary Signing Agent faces is not cutting corners. Especially when faced with an unfortunately large number of requests and the lure of the almighty dollar in a depressed mortgage market. My advice to all the new notaries who will listen is: Don't compromise, don't be bullied and always remember your oath.
WE ARE NOTARIES PUBLIC. WE ARE NOT ATTORNEYS. WE DO NOT OFFER LEGAL ADVICE.

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