Your Document Came Back Rejected. Now What?

The phone call usually starts the same way.  Someone is standing at a counter somewhere, maybe the county clerk's office, maybe a bank, maybe a title company, and the person on the other side of that counter has just slid their paperwork back across to them and said it cannot be accepted.  The notarization is no good.  And now they are calling me from the parking lot trying to figure out what just happened.

If this has happened to you, the first thing I want to tell you is that it is fixable far more often than people assume.  The second thing is that panicking and grabbing a pen is the worst possible move.  I will get to that.

Start by finding out exactly why it was rejected.  This sounds obvious, but you would be surprised how many people leave that counter without an answer.  They hear "this isn't right" and they walk out.  Go back and ask.  Ask the clerk, the underwriter, the recording office, whoever handed it back to you, to tell you specifically what is wrong with it.  If you can get that in writing or in an email, even better.  Without that, you are guessing, and guessing usually means a second rejection.

In my experience the reasons fall into a handful of categories.  Sometimes the wrong certificate was used, meaning an acknowledgment was attached when the receiving party required a jurat, or the other way around.  These are not interchangeable.  A jurat requires a verbal oath, and if that oath was never administered, the certificate is not accurate no matter how good it looks.  Sometimes the venue is wrong or missing, which is the line at the top stating the state and county where the signing actually took place.  Sometimes a name on the document does not match the name on the identification that was presented.  Sometimes the commission had already expired.  And sometimes the seal is simply smudged, faint, or printed over text so that the recording office cannot read it.

Here is where people get themselves into trouble.  They look at the certificate, they see the one small thing that is missing, and they think they can just fill it in.  Do not do that.  Altering a completed notarial certificate is not a correction, it is tampering with an official record, and depending on how it is viewed it can be a criminal matter.  I have had people bring me documents where someone had already gone over a date with a pen or used correction fluid on a county name.  At that point the document is worse off than it was when it got rejected, and there is no putting it back.

The real fix is almost always a new notarization.  That means the signer appears again, in person or online, with valid identification, and the whole thing is done correctly from the start.  If the original document is still in your hands and can be signed again, this is straightforward.  We can often turn it around the same day.  In some cases a notary can attach a corrected certificate to a document, but only for a notarization that notary personally performed, and only where the underlying act was actually completed properly to begin with.  A notary cannot repair someone else's work.  That is a distinction people find frustrating, and I understand it, but it exists for a reason.

The harder situations are the ones where the signer is no longer available.  A parent has passed away.  A signer has moved back overseas.  A document was already recorded and returned.  When that happens, the conversation shifts from fixing the notarization to finding out what the receiving agency will accept instead.  Sometimes there is an alternate path.  Sometimes there is not.  Either way, the sooner you make that call the more options you have.

Timing is usually the part that hurts the most.  Rejections tend to surface at the worst moment, right when a closing is scheduled, when a filing deadline is a day away, or when a document has to be in another country by the end of the week.  This is one of the reasons we keep our schedule flexible and offer online notarizations.  If you are five hours away from us and your paperwork came back this morning, we can often handle it over a secure video session without you driving anywhere at all.

If you want to avoid the whole exercise, bring the document to a notary who will actually look at it before anything gets signed.  We check the certificate wording, we confirm the identification requirements, we make sure blank fields are addressed, and we ask what the document is for and who is going to receive it.  That last question catches more problems than anything else on the list.  A document headed to a foreign consulate has different requirements than one headed to the county recorder, and knowing that ahead of time is the difference between a five minute appointment and a wasted afternoon.

South Texas Notary has been serving this community for more than 19 years, and we carry a $100,000 errors and omissions policy for exactly the reason this whole article describes.  Mistakes on notarized documents have real financial consequences, and we take that seriously.  If you are holding a document that came back rejected, send it over and let us take a look before you make another trip anywhere.  We handle loan signings, general notarizations, online notarizations, apostilles, and certified translations.  Call, text, or email us.  We are always happy to help.

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