Time for a National Notarization Standard!

Source: Adobe Stock.

We learned a few good things during the pandemic. For me, right after teaching us that it makes sense to let people work from home, at least part of the time, and that “Breaking Bad” is one of the best shows of all time to binge watch, is that modernizing the notarization process by permitting notaries to remotely certify that documents are properly signed and witnessed is a great idea whose time has come. In fact, during the pandemic, virtually every state in the nation allowed some form of remote notarization.

Nevertheless, luddites remain. Just the other day, the IRS got an earful of complaints about its proposal to allow spouses to alter retirement benefits remotely, even though the proposal put forward by the IRS is more stringent than the one that was permitted during the pandemic. In addition, there are still a handful of states that don’t even allow any form of remote notarization.