{"id":185145,"date":"2011-09-28T18:56:00","date_gmt":"2011-09-28T23:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/09\/28\/finally-18\/"},"modified":"2011-09-28T18:56:00","modified_gmt":"2011-09-28T23:56:00","slug":"finally-18","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/09\/28\/finally-18\/","title":{"rendered":"Finally!"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"border: 1px solid black; float: right; margin: 0px 10px; padding: 5px; text-align: center; width: 210px;\"><img decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/i990.photobucket.com\/albums\/af27\/msaroff\/drama.gif\" \/><br \/><span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Pass the Popcorn<\/span><\/div>\n<p>Even if the mortgage non-transfer transfers conducted through MERS fulfill the technical obligations required by existing real estate and trust law (they don&#8217;t), they still don&#8217;t excuse the illegal evasion of recording fees for local county clerks.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ve had a couple of smaller counties file suit, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.businessweek.com\/news\/2011-09-21\/merscorp-bank-of-america-sued-by-dallas-district-attorney.html\">now it&#8217;s Dallas, Texas<\/a>, which turn over a <b>huge<\/b> rock, and reveal what is underneath:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: blue;\"><p>Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems Inc., along with Bank of America Corp., was sued by Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins over claims its mortgage-tracking system violates Texas law.<\/p>\n<p>Merscorp Inc.\u2019s MERS, which runs an electronic registry of mortgages, cheated Dallas County out of \u201ctens of millions in uncollected filing fees,\u201d Watkins said in a statement. MERS tracks servicing rights and ownership interests in mortgage loans on its registry, allowing banks to buy and sell loans without recording transfers with counties.<\/p>\n<p>Watkins, in a complaint filed yesterday in state court in Dallas, claims MERS was established by banks including Bank of America to avoid paying filing fees, as well as to ease transfers of mortgages. The county asked the court to hold Bank of America liable as a shareholder of MERS and said the bank \u201cknew or should have known\u201d that the system would cause improper filing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>We are talking billions, if not tens of billions of dollars in fees that were illegally evaded by the banks, and Dallas County is big enough that the banks can&#8217;t afford to settle to make the problem go away.<\/p>\n<p>My heart bleeds for these ratf%$#s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Pass the Popcorn Even if the mortgage non-transfer transfers conducted through MERS fulfill the technical obligations required by existing real estate and trust law (they don&#8217;t), they still don&#8217;t excuse the illegal evasion of recording fees for local county clerks. We&#8217;ve had a couple of smaller counties file suit, but now it&#8217;s Dallas, Texas, which &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,1004,972,1088,1019],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-finance","category-justice","category-real-estate","category-schadenfreude"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185145"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185145\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}