Parties seeking to enforce rights can find those rights barred by ancient common law doctrines like ex turpi causa non oritur actio (“from a dishonourable cause an action does not arise”). But even if a person is not charged with a crime, the fact that a crime can be demonstrated to have occurred may still impact the rights of the parties. Where back dating is done for financial gain, it may also constitute the more dull-sounding criminal offence of obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception.Īlthough criminal prosecution might be a risk in serious fraud cases, in most day to day legal matters where back dating occurs for reasons of administrative convenience, or simply by oversight or error, the risk of being charged with a crime are commensurately small.
Prosecuting attorney in storm in a teacup code#
However, at common law this was a criminal offence (going by the contradictory sounding name of uttering a false document) and in most English law based legal systems it is still an offence today, although in many cases statutory provisions have superseded the common law (for example, in the British Virgin Islands see section 242 of the Criminal Code 1997). When we say “back dating” what we usually mean is executing a document and then dating it with an earlier date than the actual date of execution, with the intention that it should be treated as giving rise to legal rights before the actual date.
The first and most important thing to note about the consequences of back dating a document is that it is potentially a criminal offence. This article will try to unpick the various legal threads of when you can and cannot back date documents, and what the consequences will be if you do. However, he rarely adds that he actually ended up losing that trial, which brings us to my second point – even though the law generally deprecates the back dating of documents, the legal consequences of back dating are highly variable. My father (who was also a lawyer) used to love telling a story about how he was able to triumphantly prove to the court that a yacht charter was back dated by showing the stamps which had been used to pay the nominal 15¢ stamp duty were in fact first issued by the post office some four months after the date stated on the face of the document. The risks of back dating (or misdating) documents accidentally is multiplied in modern commercial transactions by the practice of getting all the documents signed before “completion” and then rushing around dating them afterwards. However in practice, for both good reasons and bad, back dating of documents does occur. Legally speaking, this is something that you should not do – or more accurately, there will only ever rarely be occasions when this is appropriate to do. One of the thornier issues which comes up in legal practice from time to time is the back dating of documents.
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