Compliance & Regulation

While a religious group was predicting the imminent Apocalypse last week, a set of financial services industry representatives were warning of the possible end to their own world — the collapse of the securitization market.

Republican lawmakers have drafted a proposal that would raise the minimum downpayment on Federal Housing Administration loans to 5% and drastically scale back the size of the federal mortgage insurance program, according to trade group officials familiar with the effort.

Regulators' mortgage servicing consent orders require the nation’s megabanks to conduct a thorough review of their foreclosures. On Friday they were told what "thorough" means.

After Interthinx’s mortgage fraud risk report found that employment and income fraud increased by 30% in 2010, the provider of risk mitigation solutions has added new features to its FraudGuard tool.

The Detroit Police and Fire Retirement System filed a lawsuit against Paramount Limited LLC for committing a Ponzi scheme that defrauded millions of dollars from the system.

A New Jersey man who owned and operated two foreclosure rescue companies has pleaded guilty to his role in a mortgage fraud scheme in order to commit wire fraud and money laundering.

Homeowners can use a little known but increasingly popular provision of the bankruptcy code to eliminate second mortgages and avoid foreclosure. Statistics are hard to come by, but the provision has been used effectively on hundreds, if not thousands, of cases during the past two years.

The problems for Merscorp Inc. began with questions from the lawyers representing delinquent and defaulted mortgage borrowers fighting to avoid foreclosure: Who, or what, is MERS Inc., the company whose name kept popping up on deeds of trust in the public land records and on foreclosure documents in millions of cases?

Under the authority of the False Claims Act and other laws, the government is suing Deutsche Bank and its wholly owned subsidiary, MortgageIT, for years of reckless lending practices.

Senate Banking Committee chairman Tim Johnson, D-S.D., late this week rebuffed Republican demands to take up legislation that would restructure the governance of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.