Statute of Limitaion for mortgage fraud in California (criminal).

It means the date when a reasonable person, exercising normal diligence to manage their affairs, would have discovered the offense. For example, if a no-good acquaintance forged a check on your checking account, but you didn't bother to look at your bank statements, balance your account, or see what had cleared on your account for six years, the statute of limitations would probably have run. A reasonable person would have discovered the forged check when balancing the account within, at most, a couple of months. On the other hand, if you employed a long-term, trusted bookkeeper at your business, who was fradulently processing merchandise returns and pocketing the money for years, you might not discover it because you delegated the bookkeeping tasks to a trusted employee. If the employee became sick and a replacement discovered the fraud, the statute of limitations might not start to run until the replacement employee found it. These are complicated legal questions that depend on the facts of the case.