How to Avoid Document Rejections to Work More Efficiently

Annie: Hello everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, "How to Avoid Document Rejections to Work More Efficiently." My name is Annie Bruxelles and I will be your moderator. Joining us today are Jason Staley and Cherisse Keyes. Jason is the product manager of eRecording solutions for CSC in the Logan, Utah office. For five years, he has led the Real Estate Product Team, working closely with the Development Team, recording jurisdictions, title underwriters, and lending institutions to create best-in-class market solutions to better serve the real estate electronic document recording industry.

Cherisse is an eRecording account manager at CSC. She is responsible for engaging industry professionals and providing expert advice on document recording best practices that conform to the American Land Title Association. Since joining the CSC in 2017, Cherisse has excelled at providing unique market solutions to title underwriters, lending institutions, and real estate law firms. And with that, let's welcome Jason and Cherisse.

Cherisse: Thank you, Annie.

Jason: Thank you, Annie. Cherisse, it's good to be with you again.

Cherisse: And you too, Jason. Good morning. Hi.

Jason: Good morning.

Cherisse: Thank you to all of our attendees for joining today. Jason and I are certainly excited to share a little bit more about CSC and how we can improve your document recording process and help eliminate rejection.

Today we will cover the most common rejection reasons viewed across the industry. We will review why documents are rejected and how your team can take extra precaution to help avoid rejection. You will also learn ways that eRecording with CSC can help reduce rejection. And then of course you'll get to see a live demonstration of the CSC eRecording platform in just a little bit here. And then lastly we'll open up the floor for some questions and answers.

So we will go ahead and share a little bit more about the organization itself. Some fun facts about CSC. The organization was founded in 1899 by two Delaware attorneys, Josiah Marvel and Christopher Ward. We are a global company with a huge focus on compliance and governance. And of course as you can see here, we've worked with 90% of the Fortune 500 companies on things like annual reporting, business licensing, and entity management. We support thousands of law firms and financial market customers. And we are a leader in digital brand services protecting 7 of the top 10 brands around the globe. Jason and myself are just 2 of the 2,500 global employees that get to work with people like you on corporate and legal solutions.

Jason: So what we wanted to talk about today as mentioned before. I think many of you signed up for this reason, is to talk about why documents reject. And what we've done is we've done some analysis. With CSC, we do several different services in the real estate market. We do provide some paper servicing. So we have large lending institutions that will outsource their paper fulfillment to us as well. But we also do a significant volume of eRecording in the market.

In addition to that, I actually work with the PRIA board, which is the Properties Records Industry Association. And I work with them and I've been moderating the PRIA annual survey for the last two years. In part of the survey, we actually inquired about common rejection reasons. So what we've done is we've aggregated information from both the PRIA datasets, also from our own experience and from data coming from our customers, to understand, hey, what are the common rejection reasons, and then how can we help support our customers and users to be able to reduce those problems that they face today.

So what we're going to do is we're going to take you through what we've conducted and found to be the most common reasons. So what I want to do is we mentioned we're going to give you the top five. We threw in a bonus one in there which is number six, which is also the missing PIN. But we'll go through each one of these scenarios specifically, and then we'll address each one of them.

And you see the number one being the incorrect fees, and then followed by missing legal description, incorrect office or jurisdiction. Believe it or not, this happens quite often where documents get sent to the wrong county, or in many cases like in Connecticut where there are cities or townships where documents have to be sent. That does happen quite often.

On our poll, we saw our largest one was missing or illegible notary information. That actually comes in at four, followed by missing or incorrect book, page, and then our missing PIN. So we'll jump into it. Then I'll let Cherisse take over for a little bit and talk about our incorrect fees.

Cherisse: All right. Thanks, Jason. All right, so number one reason is incorrect fees. I suppose that makes perfect sense because it's all about the money. Right? So why does this happen and how does this happen? So we know in paper recording we're attaching a check to the document sending it down to the county. When we write that check, we're hopeful that it's the correct amount, but we can never be too sure. And if the check amount is off by just a penny, the document will be rejected.

So again, why? We all know it's complicated. Right? It's difficult. Every county is different. We can be recording in multiple jurisdictions across the nation, and each county has different recording fees that the title officers may need to calculate. So how in the world are you supposed to keep up? Of course, you can rely on CSC to assist you with that. But we all know, again, there are various complications when putting these fees together.

Things that create miscalculations might be page numbers. Occasionally a county will charge an additional $3 for more than one page. Indexing requirements. Of course, if the information isn't properly listed, that could cause a miscalculation. And then we want to be sure to list the correct document type as we are recording. And then, of course, we all know consideration amounts and loan amounts are heavily into play when calculating taxes. So, of course, lots of things, lots of moving parts happening here behind the scenes.

What can all of you do to avoid an incorrect fee rejection? Of course, the easy answer is start eRecording in CSC. Why is this a good solution? We pay all the recording fees for you. So we're fronting millions of dollars overnight to all of these jurisdictions across the nation leaving more room for our submitters to focus on more important tasks. Right? Leave that up to us. We'll take care of it. You don't have to estimate the fees. And we'll get reimbursement from you after the recording takes place.

Jason: So let's talk a little bit about the legal descriptions and how they affect our rejection rate. Looks like we skipped ahead a little bit. There we go. Let's talk specifically about the legal descriptions. There we go.

Typically, as you know, the legal description tends to be in one or two formats. It's either going to be the long legal or even the short legal. And depending on how the document is submitted will also determine what is required. Typically these things, the legal descriptions will define what is the land, the metes and the bounds, the lot and block survey, fractional design, even the quantity of the land.

But what happens, we mentioned, there's two different ones. And each jurisdiction will determine what is required. Oftentimes in the paper process, strictly the long legal is required to be submitted with the document. In many cases, as you move to the eRecordings options, what you'll find is jurisdictions will require an indexing of the short legal. So Cherisse, if you want to take me to the next slide.

The first thing you can do when you're eFiling to help avoid this. With many things, it's to be able to check and review and check again and make sure that it's there. As I mentioned, some jurisdictions will require a short legal. And when eFiling, if that jurisdiction requires that to be indexed independently, we actually provide the fields for you to be able to access that and either type in the information. And we actually have some OCR tools, so optical character recognition, that allow you to select the data out of your document and paste it into the indexing field so it passes over properly typed with the exact definitions.

But one of the things to keep in mind when recording your documents, just because it's not a required indexing field does not mean you're exempt from it. In many cases, as I mentioned before, it may be required as an attachment. So the most important part about preventing this rejection is to make sure that you check, you check one more time, and you check again.

And with the imaging tools within the application, I already mentioned the OCR capabilities, but just the ability to be able to view and review your document prior to submission is a huge help. So not only do you see it physically. Once you scan it in, you'll actually be able to see it electronically prior to sending it. So provide you that extra view.

Cherisse: All right, so occasionally you may run into a recording that has been sent to the incorrect office or jurisdiction. We're all human. We make mistakes. This could happen. Why does this happen? As you can see here, there are 31 Washington counties. There are 26 Jefferson counties. Of course, some other common counties are Franklin, Jackson, and Lincoln named after our beloved founding fathers. So to complicate it even more, you might run into jurisdictions inside of jurisdictions like St. Louis County and The City of St. Louis. Same thing in Massachusetts. A lot of times they are split into districts like North, Middle, and South.

In order to avoid this, right, we want to be through, do our research, make sure that we're cautious and looking into each and every document we're filing and the property address. Just get ahead of it. We know in ePrepare while eRecording, you can search by the county name, and you will be able to identify which state you are choosing. So it will eliminate a lot of confusion as you begin recording that way. Jason, back over to you.

Jason: All right, so let's talk a little bit about the missing or illegible notary information. Our poll, if you remember, this was our highest one in the vote. All right, sometimes documents are just missing the stamp and the signature. Look, most importantly, electronically I can't help you put your stamp on there unless you're processing through pre-process. But what we can do, as I mentioned before with imaging utility . . . Cherisse, if you want to take me to the next slide . . . one thing that we can do is help you with these scenarios.

So for example, you can see oftentimes a seal or a signature is too light, and the recorder will reject it because it makes it difficult to see. And as Cherisse takes us through our demo in a little bit, what you'll see is she's going to show us some of our imaging utility capabilities. What it allows us to do is we can actually select around the notary, or even around the signature, and we have tools to either lighten the seal, or we can even darken it up a little bit. And oftentimes that can be caused by the ink that you're using, or even poor scanner quality.

Other things that can happen with your scanner is you can pick up some aberrations on your documents. So you end up with like dark silhouettes or dark corners, and the jurisdictions may reject for that. What you could do at that point is with those tools we have some cleanup capabilities in addition to the lightening and darkening to where you can actually remove some of the aberrations. So we can clean up prior to submitting it. So as was mentioned before, we have the imaging utility and the viewing capability to review every document prior to submission sot that you can ensure that it's clean and crisp and ready to be sent off to the county

Cherisse: Reason number five, missing or incorrect book, page, or instrument number. All right, so we all know that satisfactions, assignments, oftentimes reference the book and page number from a previous recording. So we're going to have to do our research again beforehand and just double-check that we have that information, of course, to avoid the rejection. If it was missing for some reason, eRecording, again, comes into play. You can add that information, or again, rely on CSC to pose those indexing fields that the county requires.

Again, we're all human. We make mistakes. If we're not paying close attention this can be missed. And the only way to really avoid it is to stay on top of things, be thorough, make sure the document types we are filing and the indexing requirements that are set in place for those document types are met. Again, with eRecording you are guided in that direction. So that will certainly lend a helping hand.

Jason: All right, so I promised I would give you an extra rejection reason for us to look at, and that's back to the missing PIN number, or the Parcel Identification Number. What it is, is it's unique to the parcel within a county. And oftentimes a county use this as a coding method to identify that parcel specifically. And oftentimes what you'll see is the parcel, or the PIN, needs to be identified on the document itself. So Cherisse, if you can take me to the next slide.

What happens is sometimes we miss putting that parcel number on the document. Or other cases, maybe it's back to the notary scenario where it's too light or too dark. In the cases where it's too light or too dark, we can adjust that. What happens when it's missing? What I've seen and have experienced with multiple customers is what happens is it will become rejected because it is missing. It comes back to the customer. And oftentimes the customer is allowed, and has a legal capability, to actually pencil in, or usually pen, but write in the actual PIN on the document.

And so what we've done to also help with this. Again, we all make mistakes, as Cherisse mentioned before. First thing to do is pay attention. But if you did happen to miss adding that PIN to your document prior to scanning into the system, we do have some tools that will allow you to actually take the number and key that in on top of the document. So sort of having to take the physical document, write it in by hand again, scan the document back into the application and send it off, you can actually just key it back in.

And then if by some chance that you do have a document that did reject because it was missing a PIN, we have the capability to prep for resubmission, which is actually with any of our rejections. But in the case with a PIN, the nice part about prepping for resubmission is you can use those imaging tools to actually key in that number specifically. And so you can get that, submit it back out.

But again, with the imaging utility that's really key in helping us reduce our rejections as submitters to different . . .

Cherisse: In just a few minutes here I'll share a demonstration of the platform. But I do want to be sure that everyone knows CSC is here to help. We have been in the game for a long time. We've actually been recognized by the 2012 Mortgage Technology Awards for our positive impacts on the mortgage industry. And we remain the most secure eRecording solution for real estate documents.

So CSC, trust us. We will assist you. We will, of course, help improve efficiencies with eRecording. Of course, it's faster. We're fronting fees for you. You have several tools available to you to avoid those rejections, of course. And we'll see that again as I walk through the demonstration in just a minute.

Reports are available. Of course that's important as you might go through several audits with your underwriters. And then, of course, we're very secure SOC 2 compliant.

Annie: Great. Thank you both Jason and Cherisse. That's all the time we have for today. Folks, again, if we didn't get to your question, we will contact you with a response after the webinar. Thank you very much to everyone who joined us today. We hope to see you next time.