Banks that need monthly financials to assure regulators that they are servicing their loans are also required to justify the documents to the regulator. If you just autogenerated it perhaps they’re wrong or falsified. While if you have to take out a pen and sign them that won’t happen.
That's beyond absurd. The content of the document is what determines whether it's falsified or not, and you can inspect the content for inconsistencies on a generated PDF far more easily than a scanned one.
In this case I think it’s the business auditors (pwc etc) assuring “best practices” that will satisfy the regulators and thus the regulatory auditors (Federal reserve, treasury, FDIC...).
Banks are themselves full of absurd practices but in this one tiny area I’d give them a pass.
Let me clarify by stating that I am not necessarily claiming that there is/was a software issue with DocuSign. There are also some big procedural differences between signing a hard copy and the way most electronic signature systems work. I could have been fooled by the user.
Regardless, I am sure there has been a version of a some document signing software somewhere that had a bug with immutability. Now paper documents aren't immutable either, but you couldn't accidentally change one with a bad where clause in a SQL statement, and casual attempts will leave evidence of the change.
BTW this is why numbers in contracts are often written “1 (one)”: because in the age of pens it was easy to change “1” to “10” or “4” or “one” to “none”
Also why checks do this — checks are actually simply contracts, which were standardized in the US a bit in the 1920s (you’d get a check form, fill in your name and the bank name, then the amounts, etc; current check design With preprinted bank info dates back I believe to the late 1960s.
Yes, absurd.