Power of Attorney question

Yorkshireman99

AnotherJoe wrote: »

I see no one, including me, answered one of the OPs questions.

OP, the original forms, all 11 pages, once stamped, ARE the POA.

And yes upon reflection it is a bit strange, why isn't there a single summary document stating that Person X is certified as the Attorney for Person Y ?

Presumably because all the detail needs to be retained so that banks etc. can see exactly what powers the attorney has.

AnotherJoe

I've just had a look at mine, it could be substantially slimmed down to the details the banks need, however i can now understand why they've done it this way.

The reason is, although it masquerades as an online process (if you do it that way), really it isn't, its a paper based exercise, and it would be administratively very difficult to take those paper forms and provide an extract.

At a point when it becomes really online, eg theres no other way to complete the forms, then it would actually be childsplay to provide a summary of the key points as the POA that gets presented to financial institutions, until then it will have to remain as is.

Yorkshireman99

AnotherJoe wrote: »

I've just had a look at mine, it could be substantially slimmed down to the details the banks need, however i can now understand why they've done it this way.

The reason is, although it masquerades as an online process (if you do it that way), really it isn't, its a paper based exercise, and it would be administratively very difficult to take those paper forms and provide an extract.

At a point when it becomes really online, eg theres no other way to complete the forms, then it would actually be childsplay to provide a summary of the key points as the POA that gets presented to financial institutions, until then it will have to remain as is.

Exactly! Designed by bureaucrats for use by bureaucrats!

AnotherJoe

Yorkshireman99 wrote: »

Exactly! Designed by bureaucrats for use by bureaucrats!

Believe me, i criticise government enough and I spent a long time working with them to know how incompetent they are in general, but given this originated as a paper based system, I think they've done a pretty good job making it possible for ordinary people to complete POAs without professional assistance.

Once i considered the issues, the next step, of producing a slimmed down POA "certificate" would actually be quite a bit more complex than what we have now, and it would force everyone to online-only which no doubt would raise howls of anguish from many, and, the payback wouldn't be that great. Maybe you'd have a 4 page document instead of 11.

They've also got plenty of other places they could spend the money and resources needed to implement that.

badmemory

Also bear in mind that there can be more than one (different) of the same page number. Sounds like double Dutch but really isn't!