Fire-rated laundry hookup box

When a laundry area is located in a garage, the recessed hookup box must be fire rated. However, in a large townhouse complex where the building department signed off on the construction in the 1990’s, should this be called out, noted, or recommend replacement?

I will with hold comment on calling it out as I am brand new to home inspections but have been a building inspector since 1993 so will try to give a little insight on this issue. In 1990 town homes were considered to be single family attached structures with a property line extending from ground to sky. Typically they had 2 separate one hour rated walls separating units. The wall separating the dwelling and the garage would be the typical separation for a single family that at that time required 5/8 type X on the garage side. There were no special requirements to protect electrical boxes or other typical penetrations. If you were to dig deep in the requirements of the time it would indicate that an opening for a washer should not be in this wall. However there were few if any building departments at the time who enforced this. This info is from the uniform building codes and there were several other national codes at that time. But they were all very similar, with the uniform codes typically having the strictest requirements. My opinion would be that this was most likely approved at the time of construction and if not considered code compliant it would be a minor issue and fairly typical of construction of this age.

Grandfathering is for, well, grandfathers. I would probably note it as a potential safety hazard…