Compliance & Regulation

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.

The vast majority of state disciplinary actions against appraisers are not being reported to the federal appraisal subcommittee, which maintains a national registry of state certified and licensed appraisers.

The special "rocket dockets" established in Florida last year to help slog through the backlog of residential foreclosure filings will be gone as of July 1, potentially paralyzing the already overloaded court system with an influx of cases and delays.

It is well documented that the discovery of fraud and abuse is far more frequently found through chance observation than through formal auditing and oversight, no matter how important those functions obviously are. However, our initial awareness that ethical or legal problems are occurring often has less to so with the actual observation of some type of error in judgment or indiscretion and more to do with some indistinct gut sense that things just don't feel right. Always trust that feeling.

Federal bank regulators need to update their commercial real estate guidance to bring standards more in line with how examiners treat loans following the financial crisis, according to a new oversight report.

Banks will face increased costs and reduced revenues as the federal government drafts and implements a new series of regulations affecting mortgage lending and servicing, according to the Comptroller of the Currency.

The Treasury Department has directed the 20 largest HAMP servicers to establish "relationship managers" who will provide a single point of contact for homeowners seeking a loan modification.