ND House Bill 1207

House Bill 1207 is “clean up” legislation from the enactment of the Revised Uniform Law on Notarial Acts (RULONA) during the previous legislative session. Sometimes when a major overhaul of a state’s Notary laws is undertaken, errors result. When the RULONA was enacted, lawmakers merged many of the existing Notary statutes in with the RULONA provisions they were enacting. In doing so, they forgot to carry forward the provision allowing for reciprocity in performing notarial acts between Notaries of bordering states and this important statute was omitted from the law. So, HB 1207 puts this back into the law and enacts it as an emergency statute, meaning that it takes effect upon enactment. The bill also corrects language in the Notary stamp section. Previously the law said that the dimensions of the seal may either be 1⅝ inches in diameter (for a round stamp) or up to our equal ⅞ inches by 2⅝ inches (for a rectangular seal). With reference to the diameter of a round seal, the statute was corrected to read “up to or equal to” 1⅝ inches in diameter. In other words, before the correction, the seal had to be the specified diameter, no more or less, but with the change the stamp may be equal or less than the specified diameter. HB 1207 also states that any civil penalty collected by the Secretary of State must be deposited in a specific fund, and pushes out the date when the Secretary must implement the online electronic database of North Dakota Notaries Public required under the RULONA until such time when the Secretary obtains the necessary resources to complete the project. The database was supposed to have been built by July 31, 2013.