The International Trade Blog 
International Sales & Marketing
Preparing an Engineer’s Certificate for an Export Letter of Credit
On: June 1, 2015 | By: 
Roy Becker |
2 min. read
I received a call from a woman at a company who had a letter of credit in payment for a shipment to Taiwan. She had a question about the documentation requirements. I retrieved the file so I could answer her question.
She asked me to read the requirement for document number four as listed on the export letter of credit. I read it aloud to her, “Engineer’s Certificate.”
She asked, “Can you explain what an Engineer’s Certificate is?”
I asked her, “Don’t you know?”
She replied, “No.”
I said, “Neither do I!”
Then I suggested that she prepare a document properly entitled, “Engineer’s Certificate,” and explained to her that Article 14 f of the Uniform Customs and Practice for Documentary Credit (UCP) states, “If a credit requires presentation of a document other than a transport document, insurance document, or commercial invoice, without stipulating by whom the document is to be issued or its data content, banks will accept the document as presented if its content appears to fulfill the function of the required document and otherwise complies with sub-article 14 (d).”
Banks become very fussy about titles of documents. In this case, the document should properly carry the title, “Engineer’s Certificate,” and the data content should be consistent with that of the other documents.
