I haven't blogged for days. I have several pending issues but I have not finished finishing them, having come to think, given the aspect of a writer that the notary has, on the other hand, so well exposed by Mr. Francisco Aranguren in this post from www.notaríabierta.com, that perhaps Harry Quebert has the problem, that from one day to the next his inspiration disappeared.
It really hasn't been like that and thanks to other colleagues who write and maintain their blogs, and at this point with special mention to just the notary, I come to the conclusion that we cannot always do simple, but thoughtful work, trying to clarify the laws, and that sometimes it may also be necessary, even as a way of distraction, to deal with more banal issues.
In this way I have arrived at this entry, which I will post in the anecdotal section of my website.
Bad payer excuses. Strange responses.
When talking about excuses for a bad payer, reference is usually made to the bizarre responses given by debtors to whom a debt is claimed, but the saying has been extended to excuses made when there is no or there has been no will to comply with our obligations, whether or not of an economic nature.
For an entire post, I would give, for example, the topic of the opposition's excuses, not only to Notaries, when they do not have their songs ready, to sing them to the preparer.
The excuses are usually repetitive, although they are adapted to the specific circumstances of each business, but surely all those who are entrusted with the job of collecting invoices have found answers like these:
examples of excuses.
a) The merchandise has not been received; b) The order has arrived incomplete; c) The genre served is not the one requested in the original order; there is an error on the part of the provider; d) There are defects in the supplied products; e) The amount of the invoice is not correct, we already told the seller;
f) We do not have the invoice; g) The invoice has not yet been authorized; h) The payment instrument (check or promissory note) has already been sent by mail, or the transfer has already been made today; g) What a coincidence, today we were going to send you the check by mail; h) It must be an error, this has already been paid for;
i) The person responsible for making the payments is absent (leave, vacation, trip); j) The signing of the check is joint, if only one of the partners signs, it is useless and the other partner is on a business trip in Australia; k) The computer has broken down and we cannot check the outstanding invoices;
l) There are no checks left in the checkbook and we will not have the new checkbook for another ten days; ll) We cannot pay them because they do not pay us; m) These days we have saturated discount lines and we cannot discount bills in the bank to have liquidity;
n) The credit policy with the bank is being processed or renewed; o) A lot of time has passed and the invoice has already expired; p) It must be a bank error when processing the transfer we made several days ago.
The repetitive nature of these excuses is what has motivated people like Pere Brachfield (PMCM director of studies and professor at EAE Business School) to come up with a response protocol, in the face of all these excuses, which can be consulted by clicking here.
Advice and notarial documentation.
Notaries do not live off the air, but we work to earn a living in an honest way, and for this we have to charge for the work we do. At this point, I would like to make a small regression, due to the idea that is tried to sell even from the corporate bodies of the Notaries, that notarial advice is free, when it is absolutely false.
Despite finding ourselves in a society that oscillates from low cost to no costWhether we like it or not, nothing in life is free. All services are charged in one way or another, but gratuity does not exist, and rather what happens is that the cost of notarial advisory services are charged by notaries who do not provide it.
The example is very clear and I will explain it with a simple case:
A few months ago a friend called me offering to have a beer at his house. I agreed, out of courtesy, and once seated in the lounge, I see that the reason for the invitation was to ask me some questions of a professional nature. His doubts stemmed from the fact that he was going to buy/help his son to acquire a home, and he wanted to know what could be the best formula in terms of cost and, above all, how to prevent his daughter-in-law from ending up benefiting from his investment, Well, we already know how young people are, that from one day to the next they separate, and to see if he ended up staying with the house that he was going to pay for.
He must have been quite happy with the consultation, and in the end he carried out the operation in the terms that more or less I had advised him, but the deed of sale was not signed with me, since the Real Estate Bank had forced him to go to a notary determined, to whom I pay a fee.
What notarial action has more value?
The prior counseling or the merely documenting. I think that everyone will think that the first one, but what happens in economic terms is that the documenting Notary has charged for a job that includes advice that he has not provided, and I, who provided the advice, was dispatched with a beer and some peanuts.
Notaries also have problems collecting.
Without going too far from the issue of bad payer excuses, as I said before, we notaries also have problems to collect, which are also aggravated by a notarial regulation, somewhat absurd, and whose criticisms I will omit, so as not to give clues to defaulters professionals.
Examples of excuses for not paying notary fees, which we experience repeatedly are the following:
a) It is that I no longer need the scriptures; b) I am not going to register them; c) The writing is very expensive, in another place they would have done it for me for half;
d) I have already paid it; e) They never told me that she was ready to pick up the deed; f) It is that my brother told me that he would pay all of it himself;
g) It's because my house caught fire, when I collect from the insurance I'll pay you; h) It is that he was traveling;
i) It's just that I forgot, can you send me the email again?; j) It's that they forced me to sign and I didn't want to.
At this point I would like to link the issue of collections with the issue of remuneration for the services provided by Notaries, since what we have exposed results in two issues: first of all, that notaries have problems collecting the collection of our fees, for work carried out correctly and with total professionalism And in second place, that Notaries have a remuneration and organizational regime that encourages the work carried out by some notaries to be charged by others.
Excuses to prevent the free choice of Notary
Actually the original intention of the post was to refer to the “bad payer excuses” that are put by Banks, real estate agencies and other Notaries, to justify the circumvention of the free choice of Notary, which has as a direct consequence a dissociation between a notary providing advice and notary documenting, with a distribution of remuneration in relation to 0 to 100.
Examples of some of these excuses would be the following:
1.- It is that in that Notary's Office they already have the deed of declaration of new work. As if you were still working with sleeves.
2.- It is that our powers of attorney have already been “registered” in that Notary. I was not aware of the Notarial Registry of powers in a specific notary.
3.- It is that this Notary is very agile. Yes, but then things come out in the press.
4.- It is that we have a lot of commitment with that Notary. Could you explain to me what they are?
5.- Today for you tomorrow for me. And if the relationship is 50/1 too?
6.- It is that they told me that you did not work on Thursday afternoons
I leave the blog open, so that whoever wants to can expose the excuses that have been made to him.
In Lleida on June 9, two thousand and sixteen.
