This is not a win for notaries or the public. Not only does the bill fail to include basic consumer protections afforded by official seals and notary journals, worse, the bill will enable federal preemption of state policy-setting for remote online notarization and in person electronic notarization that currently is controlled exclusively by the states. The result will be diminished consumer protections, greater ease of impersonation of notaries, increased fraud and ultimately, a race to the bottom. Also, there is concern among notary public administrators that the banks will use this barebones iteration of RON as a foreclosure rubber stamp machine heading into the next recession.
The SECURE Act represents the second time in recent history that federal regulation of notaries has been proposed. The first such attempt – the IRON Act – was vetoed in 2010 on the basis of consumer protection concerns. The IRON Act had included a minimum requirement for notaries to use an official seal on paper documents and a secure signing credential for electronic documents. Thus, the IRON Act actually represented a higher level of security than the level proposed by the SECURE Act. To date, no notary association has offered support for the SECURE Notarization Act. |
