Inside the foreclosure factory: Pushing the files

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They stare at computer screens and prepare sworn affidavits that are used by lenders in courts across the country to seize homes. Paid $30,700 to start, these legal process specialists, the title that goes with the job, swear an oath under penalty of perjury that they're corporate vice presidents. They're peppered with e-mails from managers to meet daily quotas of at least 11 files day.

If they fall short, they face a verbal warning. Then written. Two written warnings could cost them the paycheck that supports a family. As more than one source for this story told msnbc.com, "I can't afford to lose this job."

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The joint state and federal settlement spelled out how the document procedures at the five banks resulted in “loss of homes due to improper, unlawful or undocumented foreclosures,” according to the complaint.

"These are mistakes that could cost someone their home," a Wells Fargo document preparer told msnbc.com.

The Wells Fargo 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.

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Who owns the loan?
Once the document processors have cut and pasted the bank's accounting of fees on the affidavit that will be used to seize a home, they then review the paper trail that gives Wells Fargo the legal right to take a borrower's property. Verifying that a mortgage has been properly transferred from one lender to another can be vexing.

In the frenzy of mortgage lending in the mid-2000s, when hundreds of now-defunct lenders churned out a blizzard of mortgages that were quickly sold off to investors, the paper trail of ownership was sometimes badly scrambled, according to consumer attorneys defending homeowners in foreclosure cases. Some of those attorneys are successfully attacking lenders’ effort to paper over missing links in the chain of documents that establish who owns a mortgage.

In some cases, the transfer process relies on a widely-used third party, known as the Mortgage Electronic Recording System, or MERS, which was also cited in last year's enforcement action by federal regulators. The system was designed to bypass the costly and time-consuming process of recording mortgage transfers at county or town clerks' offices. Critics of the system, including state prosecutors who have sued MERS, have argued that it doesn't provide an adequate paper trail to prove who actually owns a mortgage. MERS has disputed those complaints and has also won some important court victories upholding its legal standing in transferring mortgages and establishing ownership of a loan in foreclosure.

In other cases, when mortagages aren't registered on the MERS system, Wells Fargo loan specialists in the Charlotte office have to verify ownership by reviewing images scanned into their computers. In theory, all relevant, original documents are available for review. But it's not unusual for a critical piece of paper to be missing, according to employees at Wells Fargo’s Charlotte office.

Locating the original document could require ordering it up from a storage warehouse in a different location, which "would probably take you forever," said the loan processor. Strictly-enforced production quotas often make it all but impossible to devote the time needed to verify each file, she said.

read the whole story here---> http://economywatch.msnbc.msn.com/_news/....

So she has never actually checked any. She dosent even know how to actually do it. That little fish should be in jail.

No, those who are responsible for making the decision to allow faulty affidavits to continue to be used to steal people's homes should be in jail. She's just a peon who needs a job to feed her kids. People are desperate these days.

However, they could arrest her to get testimony to go after those in charge. That's what Masto was doing in Nevada, going after the small fish to get them to squeal on the big fish. Unfortunately one of the primary small fish committed suicide the day of her testimony.

Bigbluffer wrote..

She's just a peon who needs a job to feed her kids.

Or perhaps she compromised whatever set of morals she may have had. "I vuz just followink orders!"