Jeffrey Rubin : mortgage fraud

OCC underestimated risk of robo-signing scandal

Jeffrey Rubin — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 01:03:00 GMT

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency missed signs of the robo-signing scandal because its examiners underestimated the risk and lacked enough guidance to find it, according to the Treasury Department Inspector General.

In March, the five largest mortgage servicers settled with federal regulators and the state attorneys for $25 billion in fees and consumer relief for documentation problems and wide-scale foreclosure abuses. The deal closed 18 months of negotiations began when the scandal broke in 2010.

The 14 largest servicers entered into consent orders with the OCC and the Federal Reserve in 2011 and are reviewing filings taken over the past two years to reimburse any harmed borrowers.

The foreclosure process is still not rebooted in many areas of the country.

"OCC examination procedures during the period 2008 through 2010 were not sufficient in scope or application to identify significant weaknesses in national banks' foreclosure documentation and processing functions," the Treasury IG said in a report Friday. "During this time OCC did not consider foreclosure documentation and processing to be an area of significant risk and, as a result, did not focus examination resources on this function."

Agency examiners told the IG they relied on internal audits done by the banks themselves, which never focused on how foreclosures were processed.

According to a Department of Housing and Urban Development Inspector General report, Bank of America improperly signed up to 20,000 foreclosure affidavits per day without required notarizations.

Instead, the OCC was looking at loss mitigation techniques and modifications processes. Its consumer warning procedures and examiner handbook were never updated to catch the problems, according to the Treasury IG.

Examiners were found to hold federal law safety and soundness expertise, not state law, which largely governs how foreclosures are conducted across the country.

In response to the report, the new Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry said in a letter that some changes were underway.

"OCC management told us that they believed the underestimation of risk in this area to be more an error in judgment than of documentation," according to the IG report.

Blatant Overlooked Fraud? eWarehouseOne

Jeffrey Rubin — Tue, 22 May 2012 16:09:00 GMT

Have you heard of eWarehouseOne?

To view TBWSDaily's video on this alleged fraud click here

eWarehouseOne's website can be found at ewarehouseone.com

Interestingly, all of the names of their account executives have been recently removed from the website. Reports suggest that over a quarter of a million dollars in application money has been collected by eWarehouseOne but they have failed to deliver anything in return.

Over the past two months National Mortgage News has been reporting on a mysterious warehouse lender called eWarehouseOne. Late this week we learned that Anthony J. Simich, a division vice president for the firm – and one of few employees there who actually returns phone calls and emails – resigned. Simich spoke briefly with NMN and declined to say much about the firm and why he left. Needless to say, he's never actually met his boss, a man named Tom Reynolds, face-to-face. Simich has been employed there at a base salary of $4,000 per month since November. Never met your boss? If that's not strange, I don't know what is. Other eW1 warehouse account executives have bolted as well, including Henry Brandt.

More

Check-up on the National Mortgage Settlement

Jeffrey Rubin — Thu, 10 May 2012 23:42:00 GMT

How many homeowners have the banks been able to help following the National Mortgage Settlement? According to this West Palm Beach news report, apparently, not many... yet.

PALM BEACH COUNTY, Fla. - It's been three months since the $25 billion National Mortgage Settlement was announced.

The news was exciting for millions of homeowners struggling to make ends meet: if your mortgage is through Wells Fargo, Citi, JPMorgan Chase, Ally or Bank of America, you could be getting relief.

But not everyone will qualify and it could take up to three years before you see any kind of reduced payments.

Darish Still, the president of Consumer Credit Managing Services, a local non-profit housing counseling agency, says your best bet is to start doing your research.

“Go to nationalmortgagesettlement.com , There you're going to get info about the settlement itself, the timeline associated with settlement, and what kind of assistance those eligible homeowners can expect to receive through the settlement,” Still said.

This week we asked all five banks how many customers they've been able to help since the settlement was announced. None had specific numbers.

Bank of America did tell us that it's mailed letters just this week to more than 200,000 potential candidates for this assistance.

Wells Fargo told us it expanded the modification program March 1st and is targeting homeowners who are facing payment challenges.

Chase says it also expanded its modification program March 1 ^st.

And Citi says it's developing programs that will be rolled out in the next couple of months.

While the wait may be tedious you need to be careful.

“Beware of scammers, loan modification scammers, national mortgage settlement scammers, beware of scammers. If they're asking you for personal information, they don't know who you are. They should know this information already. Don't give it to them,” Still said.

Sound advice when there are still so many uncertainties about this settlement.

Ally/GMAC says it has already reached out to 15 percent of its eligible borrowers and hopes to contact everyone by the end of the summer.

To learn more about the National Mortgage Settlement, click here. You can find contact information for your bank there as well.

MSNBC -- DESPITE THE MORTGAGE SETTLEMENT AND LAWSUITVWELLS FARGO STILL PRESSURING WORKERS TO PUSH THROUGH FORECLOSURES

Jeffrey Rubin — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 12:59:00 GMT

An article today on MSN.com shed more light on what was supposed to have been fixed already but it’s obvious based on the article that the ROBO Signing mess and the subsequent multibillion dollar settlement with the all of the countries Attorney Generals has done little to change at least one of the big banks.

Based on sources within the Charlotte, North Carolina foreclosure offices of Wells Fargo, the lender continues to tell workers to crank out the affidavits in order to move foreclosures. They are “pressured to meet daily production quotas, they are likely making mistakes that inadvertently could toss a family out of its home and onto the street,” according to these workers that were quoted in the story.

Pretty scary stuff… at least here in Florida we are still a judicial state where homeowners still have some rights and protections. But, the fact that this is still ongoing, just shows the shear contempt that big banks have for not only the American public but for the entire judicial system.

I believe that they factor these questions of judgment into the cost of doing business and justify it that way when all they have to do is just pay some fines and move on.

The article states that one worker “who first contacted msnbc.com via email in late January, told of a wide range of concerns about the foreclosure documents she processes. Some families apparently were denied loan modifications after only cursory interviews, she said. Other borrowers applying for help sent comprehensive personal financial documents to a fax machine that she discovered had been unattended for weeks. Others landed in foreclosure after owing interest payments of as little as $1.18 a day, according to documents she said she reviewed.”

“The legal process specialist asked not to be identified because she was not authorized to speak about the internal workings of the department, where she has worked since last year. Her account was supported by company documents and by a co-worker in the same office.”

"There was one file where they weren't even past due and they were in foreclosure status," the loan processor said. "They're pushing these files and pushing these files....”

It is apparent that if this is true that they are just thumbing their noses at the entire legal system. Can anyone say jail time? Perhaps that would change the way they do business.

In the MSNBC.com article Michael DeVito, executive vice president of Wells Fargo’s Home Mortgage Default Servicing, says the bank's processes are built to catch errors: “It’s got redundant checks in it to ensure that the documents going out the door are accurate. And the process is built to help the team member build the personal knowledge they need to sign effectively."

“No one here is asked to sign anything they don’t understand. Period. End of Story," DeVito said. "There’s no production quota and if a team member says, ‘I don’t understand this I’m not going to sign it,’ that’s fine.”

Funny that he says that because the article goes on to explain that “one manager, in a daily "3 p.m. pulse check," e-mail reminded her team recently that "we need 11 new signed notarized files per reviewer per day," reminding the staff that "I asked that you take a few files at a time to be signed [and] notarized; it does not appear we are following this process."

“On other occasions, the reminders can be more pointed. When a backlog of 59 files needed to be completed by 11 a.m. the next day, another manager e-mailed his team: "No one should be doing anything other than [these] files. No socializing, no going for breakfast, no doing [other] files ... until we are done with [these files]. It is that important. Help me out with this. If you finish all [the] files in your pipeline, you are expected to ask me for more.”

“Last December, with just a few working days left in 2011 and the pressure on to churn out the paperwork required to seize a batch of homes in Kentucky and Connecticut, one of the managers sent an e-mail urging his team to "finish this year strong."

"You must sign at least 10 NEW files every day,” the e-mail said. “Less than 10 is unacceptable.”

How then can Mr. DeVito say that no one is asked to sign anything they don’t understand?

Can anyone tell me how any person, especially a person with very limited experience in the legal and mortgage process, can review and attest to personally knowing and reviewing pages of documents and payments when you have to average about 1.5 files per hour?

In fact, they don’t do any research, it explains. These workers just take the info they are given from LPS and copy and paste it to the affidavits.

This is just plain wrong and the only real way to stop it is to make the very top people at the food chain pay for it in actual jail time.

All of us know that if we did anything that was like that, or committed the type of fraud as during the ROBO Signing fiasco even on a much smaller scale, we would be in jail.

So what do you say Mr. John G. Stumpf (Chairman, President and CEO of Wells Fargo & Company), how do you think you would look in one of those orange jumpsuits?)