The County of Ventura will charge an extra $2 to file real estate documents and will use the money to remove Social Security numbers from public files and to allow some documents to be submitted electronically.

The Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the plan Tuesday as two separate $1 fees. The fee to pay for the Social Security numbers project will expire in 2017, and the one to pay for the electronic document system will expire in a year or two.

The new fee for recording documents will be $9, up from $7.

The county processes about 200,000 documents a year, most of them related to real estate transactions, so the new fees will bring in an additional $400,000 in annual revenue.

In both cases, the County Clerk-Recorder's Office will pay for the work with loans that will be repaid with revenue from the new fees. The Social Security numbers project will be contracted to an outside firm at a cost of about $1.2 million, and the electronic documents project will cost about $200,000 up front and an additional $20,000 per year, Assistant Clerk-Recorder Jim Becker told the Board of Supervisors.

The Social Security number redaction was ordered by the state last year to protect people against identity theft. For any document that includes a Social Security number, the county must create a "public copy" with the first five digits of the number removed.

"We would still have the number in our official record, but the public record — the document provided to a member of the public who asks for it — would only have the last four digits," Becker said.

The law requires counties to examine documents dating back to 1980, but Ventura County will go all the way back to 1935, the year the U.S. Social Security Administration was founded.

There are about 28 million pages of documents that need to be examined for Social Security numbers, Becker said. Almost all of them are already in digital form.

It should take the county's independent contractor about four months to scrub the Social Security numbers, Becker said.

The electronic document project will allow the 39 title companies that regularly file with the county to submit title documents by e-mail.

That should clear up space at the public counter, where title companies typically line up in the morning to submit stacks of documents, Becker said.