Unsatisfactory conduct: Lawyer fined for false Land Transfer declaration
This is a summary of a decision by a Lawyers Standards Committee under the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006. This summary was published in LawTalk 781, 23 September 2011.
ID verifications were central to the integrity of the Land Transfer e-dealing system, a Lawyers Standards Committee said when finding a Rotorua lawyer guilty of unsatisfactory conduct.
The lawyer was censured and fined $5,000 after falsely verifying a client’s photo ID for a Land Transfer transaction.
The committee had made an own-motion investigation after an inspection of the lawyer’s trust account had raised a number of concerns. The most serious was that the lawyer had falsely witnessed an Authority and Instruction (A & I) form for a LINZ transaction, verifying the client’s photographic identification and signature in support of the form when in fact he had never met the client.
The committee saw this as extremely serious. It said that the entire system of electronic Land Transfer dealings depended on the verification given by lawyers for each transaction. What the lawyer had done was fraudulent and amounted to a false declaration.
In the lawyer’s favour, however, the committee noted that he had not attempted to deny or hide his wrongful witnessing of the document, and further that after the transaction was settled the client had sent him a properly executed A & I form.
As well as the censure and fine, the committee ordered the lawyer to pay $1,500 in costs to the New Zealand Law Society. It also decided to notify the Registrar-General of Land of its decision, so that he could take any necessary steps in relation to the lawyer’s certification for conveyancing transactions.
The original inspection of the lawyer’s trust account had also revealed some less serious concerns – two dormant balances and a $50 error in the monthly reconciliation. As suggested by the Law Society Inspectorate, the lawyer forwarded the dormant balances to the IRD as unclaimed moneys, and paid the $50 discrepancy himself to reconcile the account.
The committee said that while it was concerned about proper and robust compliance with the trust account rules, the lawyer had rectified these matters promptly, no-one had been disadvantaged, and there was never any suggestion that money had been misappropriated.
This is a summary of a decision by a Lawyers Standards Committee under the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006.