Compliance

Over the last 20 years you have all heard me speak of this agency. All federal financial institutions have to file Suspicious Activity Reports with it. The filer may not reveal to anyone this has been done under criminal penalty. The filer does it in good faith and does not even have to be right. It reaches the desks of the FBI, Secret Service and local prosecutors.

The mortgage division of D.R. Horton recently fell victim to a cyber security attack, potentially compromising sensitive borrower data, the Fort Worth, Texas-based homebuilder disclosed late Thursday.

According to the office of the inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Reginald Harper developed a scheme with Troy Fouquet, a local real estate developer, to create and use false loans to hide delinquent nonperforming loans.

Fannie Mae's second multifamily DUS REMIC of the year drew several new investors that one of its executives said were attracted by the deal's relatively strong debt-service coverage ratio, LTV and diversified collateral pool.

A new Standard & Poor's report suggests a "proactive policy orientation" that "would focus on the financial system's overarching purposes" would be helpful in meeting regulatory aims when it comes to mortgages, among other things.

After a period of decline and stability, property valuation fraud risk increased approximately 8% in the fourth quarter compared to the third quarter. Property valuation fraud is perpetrated by manipulating a home’s value to create false equity, which is then extracted from loan proceeds by various means.

Mortgage industry compliance and risk management are expected to become "quite substantial in the next five years," according to one of the co-founders of Digital Risk, a company that plans to add 1,000 full-time professional positions in this area during 2012 alone.

The foreclosure-to-rent movement is an opportunity bound to keep servicers, investors and the Federal Housing Finance Administration busy in the near future. It also is a game changer in the nation’s housing culture because while following the path of homeownership preservation it also embraces renting.

CitiMortgage has agreed to pay the Federal Housing Administration $158 million for submitting bad loans to the mortgage insurance agency for endorsement.

The single-family housing market has yet to recover in Southern California but regional opportunities are sprouting up in multifamily, according to a new forecast from Wells Fargo chief economist John Silvia.

Boxing reminds me a lot of today's lenders. Most lenders get into the ring every day, fighting until someone drops. The reason however is not to win a match, but to prevent a repurchase.

The bankruptcy trustee for Thornburg Mortgage this week agreed to settle for $6.5 million a lawsuit against the company's former executives and legal counsel to settle charges that they engaged in a conspiracy to secretly use the failed jumbo lender's employees and assets to launch a new company.

WASHINGTON - Federal officials and state attorneys general released new documents Tuesday about the $25 billion multi-state servicing settlement, but still have yet to release a final settlement term sheet.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is seeking industry and public comments on a prototype billing statement that residential servicers send homeowners to collect monthly mortgage payments.

How much does Bank of America loathe the mortgage business? Let us count the ways: it kills its wholesale and correspondent units, trims its warehouse group down to nothing, allows its departing high-performance loan officers to leave and then starts lopping off huge chunks of its servicing portfolio.

Carrington Capital Management, a unit of Carrington Holding Co., and American Home Mortgage Servicing (AHMSI) have agreed to bring to a close the action filed by Carrington against AHMSI in 2009.

The California Housing Finance Agency has revised a policy that resulted in it foreclosing on homeowners who were current on payments but had been renting out homes financed through the agency. The policy went into effect last week.

Barclays Capital analysts said in a report released last week that large region-specific note and REO auctions have become a regular feature in the past year.

Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase have been sued by the law firm Baron and Budd alleging that the financial institutions illegally levied excessive and deceptive default service fees against borrowers who were late on mortgage payments.

Bond insurer MBIA Inc. has admitted to making errors in its application to regulators seeking to split the company in two.