Through their association, the International Association of Commercial Administrators, UCC filing officers spend significant time debating and sharing information about what may or may not trigger the rejection of a submitted financing statement in their state. Recently, there has been some debate regarding what constitutes a record. For example, when submitting a UCC form with multiple debtors, if one debtor’s identification is presented correctly but another’s is incomplete, will the filing office reject the document in its entirety, or will it reject part of the document?
For example, a mailing address for the debtor is required in all states. If I have provided an address for debtor #1, but not for debtor #2, what happens to my financing statement? There has yet to be consensus across the jurisdictions. Some argue that a record constitutes the information that is indexed – which could certainly be a portion of the submitted document. The risk here, however, is that the searchers reviewing filed copies of financing statements are likely to assume that the filing is effective for all debtors if the document was accepted and date-stamped. Best practices, as always, require filers to run searches to reflect on all debtors in order to confirm effective indexing for all.