WHAT IS REMOTE INK SIGNED NOTARIZATION?

WHAT IS REMOTE INK SIGNED NOTARIZATION?

Background. In December 2019, reports of a new infectious disease came out of Wuhan, China. On February 11, 2020, the World Health Organization gave this new disease its official name, COVID-19.1 On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Two days later, a national emergency was declared in the United States.

State and local health departments sprang into action. Broad stay-at-home orders were imposed, nonessential businesses shuttered, entertainment and professional sports halted, travel between states and outside the United States was curtailed, workers lost their jobs, and the U.S. stock market dropped over 10,000 points in the initial weeks of the crisis. The pandemic could have decreased demand for the services of Notaries Public, but it did not.


​Patients sick with COVID-19 urgently needed to have medical powers of attorney and heath care directives notarized. People scrambled to establish estate plans. Homeowners, taking advantage of interest rates lowered by the Federal Reserve to prop up a flailing economy, took out and closed mortgage loans in record numbers. Faced with increased demand for notarial services, a rapidly spreading virus, and the need to keep people socially distant, Notaries resorted to performing notarizations at a safe social distance outdoors, in garages, on porches, through windows, and side by side in cars. Not everyone wanted to obtain notarial services in this manner, and some were too sick to even try.

Remote Ink Signed Notarization: Temporary Accommodation or Permanent Solution? 3 the requirement for a signing party to physically appear before a Notary and allowing audiovisual communication tools such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and WebEx to be used instead. Since paper documents were signed and transmitted electronically between the principal and Notary or delivered back and forth through postal mail, this new form of notarization was named “remote ink signed notarization” (RIN) to describe how the parties appear before each other (“remote”) and sign documents (“ink signed”).

Source: NNA