What’s at the Bottom of the ‘Robosigning’ Scandal?

By: Nicole Kardell

The problematic practice of robosigning – whereby banks and other lenders improperly foreclosed on properties through formulaically processing foreclosure documents – has been much in the news over the past couple of years. The feds have been investigating banks and individuals; state attorneys general have joined forces in pursuit of robosigners; and, unsurprisingly, there have been a number of class actions filed by consumers whose homes were foreclosed.

The fallout of these actions has been somewhat inconsistent. On the settlement side, banks and individuals are facing hefty penalties: Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Ally entered into a massive $25 billion settlement with the Justice Department and state attorneys general (of 49 states) in early 2012. The mortgage servicing firm, Lender Processing Services (LPS), recently entered into a $120 million settlement with a coalition of state attorneys general (of 45 states). A founder of one of LPS’s subsidiaries, Lorraine Brown, pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy charges and Missouri state charges and faces not less than two years imprisonment.

Those defendants who have not settled may be faring better. In early March, a Nevada district judge threw out an entire case against two title officers of LPS who faced more than 100 felony counts. (The judge’s ruling was not merits-based but rather based upon prosecutorial misconduct.) A New Jersey federal judge recently dismissed a putative class action against Bank of America, noting the plaintiff’s failure to prove that robosigning constituted fraud.

Part of the challenge for cases that don’t settle out may be proving damages to homeowners who lost their homes: If a home was foreclosed on deadbeats, where are the damages in rapid-fire paper pushing? Some banking experts have found that, between 2009-2012, mortgage servicers created some 800,000 foreclosures that could have been avoided through loan modification programs. And foreclosure practices at BofA and Morgan Stanley subsidiaries were found to have violated the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, which provides active servicemembers financial protection in matters such as civil proceedings, income tax disputes and foreclosures. But these two categories are only a small subset of foreclosures, which have amounted to between one million and four million each year for the last six years.

One lesson from these matters may be that settling is not always the best option. But another take-away that hasn’t come up is how banks and mortgage servicers got into the practice of robosigning in the first place. The issue faced by the banks and lenders was a glut of foreclosures and a related mountain of paperwork to process those foreclosures. How could they effectively address the problem and the dead weight on their ledgers? The answer was to institute an efficient, and automated, process. The problem with automation, though, is a lack of oversight or subjective inquiry – the very purpose behind much of the required foreclosure documents.

While the banks and processors are certainly to blame for false certifications and notarizations, their actions are not as nefarious as many make them out to be. How often are we all guilty of “robosigning” the terms and conditions for a new software program or credit card application? How often do we read all the new disclosures that financial institutions are required to send with each statement or loan request? Part of the problem is that we are faced with a mass of disclosures resulting from both regulation and excess litigation. The information overload is part of what has played out in the robosigning scandal.

The Government Accountability Office just released a report criticizing the Federal Reserve’s review of the robosigning matter, saying that the review itself has become cumbersome and inconsistent. The only problem is that there is no realistic resolution to the problem. Until we can devise a way to be both thorough and totally efficient in processing information, we will inevitably face new versions of the robosigning scandal.