It’s bad enough that some of us are still not used to writing the proper year on our checks and other legal documents here in 2020, but the crew of professionals at Kruggel Lawton CPAs strongly encourage writing out the complete year when you sign things. Use the full 2020.
We’ve all done it: you get ready to write a check in the early part of the New Year and you accidentally date it for the previous year. For the first few weeks of every year that usually mindless task actually requires us to focus in order to complete properly.
However, the team at Kruggel Lawton has solid logic and great advice regarding any time that you are signing checks or other legal documents throughout the course of the year. They advise that we not abbreviate the year to “20,” but instead use all four digits “2020.” Why? Because signing “20” leaves an opportunity for the date to be changed to “2019” or “2021” or any other future year in this century.
National Association of Consumer Advocates, Ira Rheingold, cited the following examples:
“If you have an old check lying around that’s dated 1/4/20 and someone finds it, they could add “21” to the end of that date, and voila, the check is no longer stale. Or, let’s say you sign a credit contract — an agreement between a borrower and a lender — and date it 1/4/20. Say you then miss a month or two of payments, and the lender goes to collect the debt that’s owed. Theoretically, they could add “19” to the end of that date and argue that you owe more than a year’s worth of payments.”
Officials who deal with fraud say that this is far more of a problem than the usual document tampering they’ve dealt with in the past, because in order to change a date that ended in “19,” the scammer would have to date the check at least 20 years older than intended. For example, changing a lease agreement from “19” (for 2019) to 1999 would draw more red flags than changing it from 2020 to 2019.
Kruggel Lawton professionals remind us that while date abbreviation is a hotly discussed topic this year, it really brings up a best practice that should be followed no matter what the year is in order to reduce your risk of falling prey to fraud. They strongly recommend always taking that extra second to include the year’s first two digits when writing checks or official documents including tax returns, loans, legal paperwork, and similar such materials that are considered binding in various ways.
Great advice from a team who deals with important documents all day every day.
