Variations in Recording Fees

If you bring the exact same document to several registries of deeds, you should pay the same recording fee, right? Well, such is not the case in the Commonwealth. The biggest culprit (document-wise) seems to be a document that discharges a mortgage and an assignment of rents. At this registry, we would charge you $75 to record the document and make marginal references to both the mortgage and the assignment of rents. At another registry, you would be charged $150 because that one piece of paper would be treated as if it were two different documents (at those registries, it is called a "multiple document" and is indexed twice, just as though it were two separate things). It gets even more complicated when that same document also discharges a Financing Statement. Is the correct fee still $75 with three marginal references, or is it $195 ($75 + $75 + $45)? Who's right? Since there's really no need to index such a discharge several times as long as you make marginal references to the appropriate documents (an act that takes about 5 seconds per reference), I don't see the point in doing it. It just creates more work for us and confusion and additional expense for the customer. Still, it's gotten to the point that users want a uniform interpretation on this issue, so I might have to go along with the higher fee. This will be discussed next Wednesday at the Registry of Deeds Advisory Committee meeting. You'll be among the first to know the results of that discussion.