Consular employees will be able to certify the equivalence of electronic and paper documents

Earlier, the coronavirus pandemic, and later the political situation and the associated restructuring of air traffic and logistics, significantly affected the delivery time of documents from different countries to Russia. In this regard, citizens and legal entities have difficulty exercising their rights. The problem will be solved by granting officials of consular offices the right to perform a new notarial act — to certify the equivalence of an electronic document to a document on paper.

Equivalence will help if you urgently need to send a power of attorney to Russia. For example, to dispose of an apartment or prepare any documents. In addition to powers of attorney or wills issued at the consulate, we may be talking about the originals of various documents that may be required to perform legally significant actions. For example, birth certificates, marriage certificates and the like.

Situations in practice may vary. For example, one of the parents stays abroad with their son or daughter for a long time. The second parent in Russia needed to provide the original birth certificate of the child to confirm the relationship in order to apply for benefits from the employer or government agencies. If you send a document by courier, it can be quite expensive and take a long time. In addition, the delivery service may lose the cargo.

How will the certificate of equivalence work abroad? A person will be able to contact the consulate, where his document will be scanned, signed with an electronic digital signature and handed over to him. The applicant, in turn, will be able to send the digital document to Russia. If necessary, there it can again be converted into paper format with the help of a notary. It is important that such a document will be equivalent to the original itself, and not just a copy. Now such “teleportation” helps to transfer documents within the country in a matter of minutes. In less than 11 months of 2023, 3.6 million such notarial acts were performed.

Third Secretary of the Department of General Consular and Legal Issues of the Consular Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Irina Dulova noted the value of the notary’s expert proposals. In particular, thanks to them, the provision that a consular officer can certify the equivalence of only those documents that he himself had previously certified was removed from the original text of the bill. In general, any documents can be “teleported”, except for identification documents and transactions in simple written form.

Compared to notaries, the competence of consular officials of foreign institutions in the field of notaries is very limited. They can only perform certain notarial acts. For example, certifying powers of attorney, wills and orders to revoke these documents. At the same time, only notaries, their acting and authorized employees of the notary chamber have access to the notary’s unified information system — a reliable database where all notarial actions are recorded. Accordingly, other persons, including consular officers, in principle cannot enter the system, enter information or perform any actions. Strict requirements and a high level of security of the notary’s UIS guarantee the preservation of notarial secrets, the integrity of information, and protection from forged documents and fraudulent activities.

Data on documents certified at consulates are entered into the notary’s UIS according to a specific algorithm. The employee of the foreign institution who certified the document sends the data to the Consular Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Representatives of the department transmit information to the Federal Tax Service. Employees of the Federal Notary Chamber, after established checks, enter information into the notary’s Unified Information System.

At the same time, it is important not only to transfer information to the notary’s EIS, but also to complete it. In July 2024 another important law will come into force. Employees of consular departments will be required to attach scanned images of certified powers of attorney, wills and orders for their cancellation to the information they submit to the Unified Information System of Notaries. This is necessary so that when checking a document, the notary can look at the text of the original. Compare it with what the applicant presents, that is, fully check the data on the representatives, the list of their powers or, for example, read the text of the will when opening an inheritance case.

So far, according to consular documents, notaries see in the system only the details (date of certification, registration number, etc.), but do not see their content. Fraudsters can take advantage of this by leaving the real details of the document, but completely replacing its text. In controversial situations, the notary is forced to send written requests to consular offices in order to obtain complete data. Given the diplomatic pouch schedule, sending certified copies of documents may take a long time. A scanned image, which will be attached by an employee of the consular office immediately upon certification of the document and will be entered into the notary’s Unified Information System, will help solve the problem in practice.

An important area is also the professional training of consulate staff. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs quite often receives various questions about the procedure for performing certain notarial actions. Cooperation in this area is expanding. In particular, notaries prepare programs to train consular officials in notarial practice.

Of course, if possible, it is safer to perform notarial acts with a notary. Only he has the necessary qualifications, which he constantly improves. The main task of consular services is to represent the interests of the state abroad; for obvious reasons, they do not have such deep specialization in notarial issues. In addition, only notaries bear full financial responsibility for their work.

source: Federal Notary Chamber