Can a digital signature be used in place of actual signature on legal documents

Question

This isn't exactly on topic for stackoverflow but I have a feeling that someone has come across this issue before and while I was trying to research into it a little, I could not find an answer.

I have an online store where people can purchase Items that are considered to be "tax exempt". The online store is new and we currently just have them fill out a tax exempt form when they come in the store if we don't already have them in our records. I am trying to figure out how to handle tax exemptions for the online store.

A requirement is that we must have the form that the customer filled out at the store with their signature on the form. In order for a new customer online, who has not previously filled out a form, to immediately receive the tax exemption for their purchase I was wondering if it is legal for them to fill out a PDF and "digitally sign" the form, if this is considered valid or does their signature have to be hand-written?

Answer 1

Do not confuse a scanned or digitalized signature with a "digital signature" that has to be validated by a recognized Certification authority to be legally binding.

In order to add a digital signature you need a "digital certificate" that is stored in your computer.

You can associate a scanned signature to the "digital signature" but the truly important one is the part associated to the digital certificate.

Anyone can scan any document signed by you and use it elsewhere so that has no value...

Answer 2

I don't know if you know about actual "digital signatures". I researched about those and their validity in law. You should check out this for laws based on the nation. Also look into this http: //www.uncitral.org/uncitral/en/index.html for general information and this http: //www.uncitral.org/pdf/english/texts/electcom/ml-elecsig-e.pdf for digital signature based law. Sorry for not linking the URL properly, I need more reputation to do that. Just remove the space between the http: and // Hope it helps.

Answer 3

For our business we use digital signatures then print them out on the documents we need to hand in to the government. We where using Jsignature to get the online signatures witout having them mail or photocopy their signature. We then use a php PDF generator to automaticly put their signature onto the PDF that we can print out. If you want to see a working example go through this Signup process. To see how we implemented it on our clients site.