I see notaries advertising that they’ve completed 1,000+ signings or 20,000 signings, and that they have 20 years experience as a notary, but how can anyone prove that? References can be faked with help from family and friends, and if the notary public is self employed, what job can you call to verify their claims? Can you call the state to verify expired notary commissions? Is it even possible to verify if someone was a notary 10 or 20 years ago? Just curious.
You’re right. There is no way to publicly verify how many (or few) notarizations a notary has actually done (except maybe TX…where I believe a notary’s journal is available for anyone to view. I hope that they do restrict it to the requesting party has to name a date, location & signer’s name in order to access that info, but don’t know as I’m not in TX.)
However, trying to fake it and then making a rookie mistake would not only give you away, but would put your trustworthiness in serious doubt.
Many states SOS do have a website with a ‘list of notaries in good standing’. AR does that and includes past/expired commissions. I’ve never checked other states, but am sure AR isn’t the only one doing that.
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Ms Arichter, thanks for all your help. God bless. Jesus loves you.
In Washington State you can actually look up a notary by name and/or license number. When they show up you can click on their name and their information will show up to include status, years that licenses have been renewed, whether there have been any disciplinary actions, etc. I don’t believe there is a database that is open to the public to verify how many signings people have actually completed. However, if I am ever challenged about my signings, I would be able to produce my (modified) spreadsheets to show you my numbers. I would hope most of us could do that, as we need to have some way to track outstanding invoices and payments. I Hope!
While each state is different, here in Ohio, we just switched to the SOS being the repository for Notary information. Prior to 2021, we Ohio notaries were registered by the trial court of the area where you lived (i.e. Common Pleas Court for Cuyahoga County). If you wanted to work in another county then you had to be registered with the Common Pleas Court for that county. To that point, in terms of investigating the validity of a Notary’s experience in Ohio, then you’d have to go to each county where the notary was registered in and view their expired commissions with each. The process could be taxing.
For me, I’ve been a notary since 1999, but back then the Notary Commissions had a number on them that didn’t reflect the year you received it. Later in the 2000s they went to a newer format showing the year obtained. So from there, every new Commission (new or renewed) received a new number. So to find the work performed, you will need to know the particular transactions and view each transaction. Now my Private Investigator License keeps the same number that I obtained in 1999, and the Licensee has to keep a record of the number of hours and cases that’s kept with the Department of Public Safety, Homeland Security. The courts didn’t have such a repository and I’m not sure the SOS has a transaction repository either.
Agree with Arichter (as below) with a caveat.
CAVEAT: In some states, if the notary alters their name/the manner in which they sign their name; i.e., shortening/lengthening the content, changes due to marriage/divorce, etc. they will receive an entirely new Commission, new Commission number, etc. AND the new Commission number is not always connected/referenced to the previous one. As such, it may be tenuous (at best) to connect the proverbial dots on the comprehensive tenure.
I’ve done over 800 and I have the notary journals to prove it.
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In Texas the notary journal is public record. A person must request in writing exactly what they are looking for so the Notary can provide a certified copy of a specific record. The entire journal is not kept open to any one to review.
You can go to the recorder’ s office and examine the mortgages signed for the last several weeks or months and see who notarized the document I wanted to know who a certain bank was using for its closings and was able to determine that. It is a laborious process and only did it at the time since it was an off period for closings.
If a notary is working with a signing board, then yes, his/her completed closings and ratings are verifiable and sometimes public.
In addition, title companies, lenders, loan originators, and TA’s can be called on to verify closings, experience, rating, etc.
This is what I used to do for marketing - check county recorder to get title company names on recorded mortgages and contact them for work.
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The notary is supposed to be a disinterested third-party who can be trusted to complete signings. So if any notary lies about his/her experience, then that notary has no integrity. It doesn’t make sense to me to lie about number of closings, or years of experience. I think that in the long run, the experience will show in the work done.
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At the end of the day how you perform and how much mistakes you make shows if one is truthful about their experience or not. Even if you don’t have experience and work with a company and do a good job that will keep the business coming . So, it is not about how many years you have worked, it is how you actually do the work.
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This is just a random observation about ‘experience’ and applies in any field, imo.
While I have been doing this for 26 years, pragmatically, I have 2 years experience 13 times as everyone learns 99% of any job in the first two years…and spends the rest of their career discovering the remaining obscure, rare, once-in-a-lifetime 1%.
Keep you journal in excel. I have every notary I have done since my Louisiana commission in January 2017.
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That will depend on state law - some states that require a journal (for traditional notarizations, not addressing online notarizations here) - require that the journal entries be on “bound” pages - excel does not satisfy that requirement.
Not to my knowledge. The only one that does show how many signings a notary has completed is snapdocs and that about the only thing I have seen on their platform. So if an notary is not on snapdocs you will not know that info.
You can also generate a report of your closed signings with Express Notary and BancServ.
My first journal entry in 1998 was a loan document signing. So if I did one signing a year that would add up to over 20 loans. Last month 4/2021 i signed 63 loans, obtained 27 apostilles from the SOS and notarized 4 living trusts. I also masked and gloved up to visit several signers in assisted living facilities. I’ve been moving at that clip for decades and if it seems a lot, trust me it’s not a high paying occupation. How would I advertise that body of work? Like “hey I’ve done 5,000 loan signings”, hire me? The last thing (over my dead body) would be to allow someone to verify my work by parsing through my retired notary journals. I see notaries touting high loan signing numbers all the time and have wondered the same thing but there’s a point when you stop counting, that’s when you know your a pro.
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