The NACHA Operating Rules have been modified to facilitate the use of electronic agreements and the electronic storage of records in conformance with the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce (E-Sign) Act. This rules does not mandate that documents be executed in electronic form, but provides ACH participants with an alternative to hard copy documentation.

The term "affidavit" will be removed from the Rules and will be replaced with the term "written statement under penalty of perjury". This change was made to clarify that, for purposes of the NACHA Operating Rules, this document does not need to be notarized. RDFI's may, at their option, continue to use the affidavit and/or require that it be notarized.

The Return Reason Code of R51 has been amended for RCK entries to include the reason "the amount of the RCK entry was not accurately obtained from the item". The amount of the RCK entry is to be only for the amount of the check that was returned for insufficient funds (NSF). If the Originator wishes to collect a fee through the ACH for processing an NSF item, the transaction for the amount of the fee must be submitted with a Standard Entry Class Code of PPD, and must be authorized in writing by the consumer.

The Return Reason Code of R53 has been added for RCK entries. The time to use R53 is when both the RCK entry and the item (check) to which the RCK entry relates have been presented for payment.

Return Reason Code R10 " Customer Advises Not Authorized" has been amended for returning a transaction with the POP Standard Entry Class code. You can now use R10 when the source document used to create the POP transaction was improper. Refer to the list of items that may not be used as source documents in subsection 3.7.1 of the NACHA Operating Rules.

The Return Reason Code of R37 has been added to allow for returning a POP transaction when the source document has also been presented for payment.

In the case of all Return Reason Codes listed above, an affidavit must be obtained before re-crediting the consumer's account and returning the transaction. Also, for all of the above Return Reason Codes, the RDFI must return the item in time for it to be available to the ODFI no later than the opening of business on the banking day following the sixtieth calendar day following the Settlement Date of the original ACH entry.

The NACHA Operating Rules will be amended to limit the number of times that an ACH entry that has been returned for R01 (Insufficient Funds) or R09 (Uncollected Funds) may be re-initiated. Items returned for these reasons may be re-initiated a maximum of two times following the return of the original entry. This amendment applies to all Standard Entry Class codes except RCK. RCK has its own limit of three total presentments in combination of paper and electronic.

Several of the March 15 rule amendments will require us to make changes to our CAP2000 ACH core processing software. If you use CAP2000 you can look forward to receiving an update near the end of February.