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OR Administrative Rules 2010 (Seal

Rule/Regulation

State: Oregon

Effective: June 01, 2010

Summary

Oregon amends its administrative rules for Notaries by changing the way information about approved vendors of educational courses appear on the Secretary of State’s Web site, by repealing prior rules that specified the exact dimensions of elements and information in a Notary’s official stamp and optional embosser and by now requiring all information in stamps and embossers to be reasonably legible. The new seal rules are temporary rules that are effective from July 1, 2010 through December 28, 2010. The Notary educator list rule is effective June 1, 2010.

Affects

Amends Sections 160-100-0100, 160-100-0110, 160-100-0120, and 160-100-1100 of the Oregon Administrative Code.

Changes
  1. Changes the way information about Notary education vendors is presented on the Secretary of State’s Web site.
  2. Repeals prior provisions stipulating the exact dimensions, type size and weight of the information appearing in the Notary’s official seal, no longer requires this information to be printed in capital letters, and now requires that all seal information must be reasonably legible.
  3. Repeals a prior provision that stipulated that the month of the Notary’s commission expiration date must be expressed in a name not abbreviated.
  4. Clarifies that when a Notary uses an additional imprint of the Notary’s official seal to mark for identification any “loose” notarial certificate attached to a document, the additional seal will be partially stamped on the notarial certificate and partially on the document or attachment to the notarized document.
  5. Repeals prior provisions stipulating the exact dimensions of the outer and inner concentric circles of a Notary’s optional embosser, no longer requires the information in the embosser to be printed in capital letters, and now simply requires that all information must be legible.
Analysis

New administrative rule amendments published by the Oregon Secretary of State’s office affect the way educational vendors providing mandatory Notary courses are listed on the Secretary of State’s Web site. Before, the online list was searchable, but the Secretary’s office found that no one utilized this search functionality. Thus, the Secretary determined that a simple listing of educational providers was the best way to present this information. The amended rules affecting the Notary seal and embosser allow for considerably more latitude. Before, the exact parameters on length, height, and font size for Notary stamps and embossers were delineated; now, the requirement is simply that Notary stamps and seals must be reasonably legible. Any existing Notary seals or embossers created according to the prior standards are still valid, provided they are legible. Further, the new rules do not require seal manufactures to abandon making seals according to the previous rules; seals can be made according to the prior standards provided the information in the seal is legible. According to the Secretary of State’s office, the rule was modified to prevent the Secretary’s need to cite a millimeter error in dimensions or type size as a reason to reject a filing. Note: the Notary stamp and seal rules are temporary rules that are effective from July 1, 2010 through December 28, 2010. The reason for issuing temporary rules is to give the Secretary of State more time to issue a permanent filing and the public more time to provide input on the final rule.

Read the adopted administrative rules (see page 358).

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