Hi,
I am staying abroad and I have received the stimulus check from the Treasury. I do have a bank account in the US. Usually, I ask my friend to deposit any checks I receive into my account. However, my bank's customer service person told me that an IRS/Treasury check must be deposited in person by me at a branch!!! Is this correct (I suspect that the he was not well informed)? Don't people deposit these US Treasury checks in their bank's drop-boxes or in the ATM machines?
Thanks.
I hope you're young and, thus, not well versed in dealing with banks, where the level of bureaucracy puts the government to shame. Just have your friend sign your name and deposit the check in your account. The bank isn't going to blink.
And yes, I deposited mine through the ATM.
If the account is in the name on the check and it is all deposited w/ no request for return cash, etc., I'd be surprised any bank would actually require a signature at all.
I'd recommend a "For deposit only" endorsement over asking the friend to sign a wrong name (even for a noble purpose :) ) what's he going to do when/if they would ask for id at that point? Now he's got a problem that will be much harder to unravel.
If OP still has the check in his possession, I'd suggest simply mailing it w/ the above endorsement to the bank (can't take much if any longer to get it there than to the friend, anyway, unless he's there visiting or something, in which case he can take the endorsed check w/ him).
$0.02, imo, ymmv, etc., etc., ...
Banks are allowed to take checks without endorsements, but they are not required to.
It is permissible to allow someone to sign your name for this purpose. Even without a power of attorney or authority in writing, the authority legally makes it your signature.
Stu
It is? I've always told my clients never to forget a signature. did they change the law?
ChEAr$, Harlan
Stuart A. Bronstein wrote: ...
"Permissible" means "required to accept" in this regard? I never heard of that before, certainly.
That it goes into an account of the same name seems to make it moot point; seems puzzling would be any reason whatever to prefer an anonymous (essentially) signature over none. But, that's an engineer's view... :)
It's always best to have the actual signature. But in a pinch I think it's perfectly legitimate to authorize someone else to sign for you. How many people have their spouse endorse their paychecks for deposit, for example? Nothing wrong with that in my view.
My opinion on this comes by negative implication from the Uniform Commercial Code. Under the Code it says,
"'Unauthorized signature" means a signature made without actual, implied, or apparent authority. The term includes a forgery.'
Since "signature" isn't defined by the code, it should mean whatever isn't an unauthorized signature.
Stu
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