Adding a password to the completed PDF from DocuSign would break the digital signature DocuSign adds to prevent the file from being tampered with.

Just a thought but can you add the DocuSign PDF and other documents to a password protected .zip file?

Hi, Thank you for that information. It might work for us. Best regards, Wendy

One other thought...

If the additional documents that need to be sent to the government agency are already available and not sensitive, you could add them to the envelope along with the document that needs to be signed and add the government agency with the action Receives a Copy. You could possibly even hide them from the signers using Document Visibility if that feature is available in your account. With Document Visibility, the additional documents with no fields would only by visible to the sender or the Receives a Copy recipients. Of course, this mechanism doesn't password protect anything, but it does control who gets access to the documents.

Thank you. I don’t think the option below will work for us but appreciate the suggestion. Best regards, Wendy 

I have a similar problem, in that I need to password protect documents before storing them to our local subversion repository, thus restricting access to need-to-know persons within our network. There's a work-around I've found in Adobe; not sure if it will work in other pdf tools. In Adobe, you can export the pdf to a Word document. Once you have the document open in Word, you can then print to pdf. Once the document is printed to a new pdf, which looks identicle to the original btw, you can then password protect the document.

Hope this helps!

Wendy Hughes

Hi,

Exporting the PDF to Word and then saving it as a PDF with password protection works well, but it should be pointed out that the document will lose its integrity because the digital signature certificate was removed in the conversion and the document can be manipulated by whoever has the password. It looks identical, but it truly isn't imho.

Without question you're changing the nature of the document. Whether or not this is an acceptable workaround depends upon your individual use case. In my case, I have confirmed the authenticity of the signature through Docusign, which satisfied my internal requirement, but I then need to save the documents that contain sensitive PII in an open network. I am the only one who has the password and it serves it's purpose.

2 points to add to the suggestion in case it helps others:

First, you should be able to open the the original DocuSign PDF in Adobe and print to PDF right there without first converting it to a Word document. That just seems like wasted effort and possibly open to unexpected formatting changes.

Second, I would personally opt to store the original DocuSign PDF with the digital certificate intact and use the repository's access controls to restrict who can access the files rather than try password protecting the documents themselves.