Real or fake – how to verify court documents

We live in a world where documentation fraud, as with over-the-top marriage vows, are of real concern.

The question often asked is: How do you ascertain the genuineness for either?

In the context of a marriage, my educated guess would be, if just 12 months or thereabouts after the “I will love you and your mother to the ends of the Earth”, is followed by angry divorce papers, then that may be a good indication that the vows came from a Google search, and not directly from a person’s unjaded heart.

As for ascertaining the genuineness of documents, specifically court-approved documents, entailing inter alia, Judgments, Orders, Probates, Letters of Administrations, Power of Attorneys, etc, we need to look at the pre-2011, and post-2011 periods.

In pre-2011, original court documents were affixed with the court’s official seals, and copies thereof would have had to have the court registrar’s certifications on the same, that they are indeed true copies of the originals, and duly signed with real ink pen as confirmations.

In post-2011, after the introduction of the “e-filing system” (EFS), court documents would either have serial numbers or both serial numbers and QR codes at the bottom left-hand corners.

Where the court document displays only the serial number, verification is done by keying the same (without its prefix of “S/N”) at the following government site.

That should then officially reproduce the court document in question and not the unended shopping list of your better half.

Alternatively, where the serial number and QR code are both made available, you can choose to scan the QR code instead with your mobile phone (the easier and preferred option).

By doing so, you would again be brought to a government site, and after keying a much simpler CAPTCHA code (generated by the site in question), instead of the mile-long serial number, the court document would be reproduced as before.

Straightforward, and simple.

In this regard, courts have done much to liaise with other government agencies (federal and state) to have documents under EFS accepted without the need to have copies of the same to be certified as true.

But here lies the problem, not all bureaucrats seem to understand that, and this can happen even within the same government agency.

From my personal experiences, the Selangor Land Office in Shah Alam, is one such example of that occasionally happening.

On the one hand, you have land office registrars accepting at face value and without more, court documents which display serial numbers and QR codes as authentic.

On the other hand, you have land office registrars who apparently did not get the latest memo, and still insist on the old style of pre-2011 verification methods, but oddly, for post-2011 documents under EFS.

And then there is this special third category of land office registrars, the crème-de la-crème of civil servants who insist that copies of court documents must be printed in colour, as those documents apparently derive their legitimacy through the vibrancy of such hues. Only in Malaysia.

Moving forward, I sincerely believe these are matters that can be easily resolved and ironed out between government agencies.

On a personal level, and as part of long-term microplanning, my hopes are that parents who see their precocious five-year-olds displaying early signs of the love for bureaucracy – e.g. showing great interest in reading the National Land Code, stacking papers and pens neatly in a particular order but without any real purpose, etc – to treat them with extra kindness, and hug them regularly, for the long-term ramifications are far-reaching in the years to come – especially if they are deprived of such nurturing love, and eventually, sitting grumpily at the front lines of that very bureaucracy in their adulthood.

This is the personal opinion of the writer and does not necessarily represent the views of Twentytwo13.

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