New Economic Perspectives has the article The Wall Street Journal Still Refuses to Grasp Accounting Control Fraud via Appraisal Fraud by William Black.
I’ll give you the beginning of the article.
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) report described one of three epidemics of accounting control fraud that drove the financial crisis in these terms.
“Some real estate appraisers had also been expressing concerns for years. From 2000 to 2007, a coalition of appraisal organizations circulated and ultimately delivered to Washington officials a public petition; signed by 11,000 appraisers and including the name and address of each, it charged that lenders were pressuring appraisers to place artificially high prices on properties. According to the petition, lenders were ‘blacklisting honest appraisers’ and instead assigning business only to appraisers who would hit the desired price targets” [FCIC 2011: 18].
The FCIC Report then documents scale of this epidemic of loan origination fraud.
“One 2003 survey found that 55% of the appraisers had felt pressed to inflate the value of homes; by 2006, this had climbed to 90%. The pressure came most frequently from the mortgage brokers, but appraisers reported it from real estate agents, lenders, and in many cases borrowers themselves. Most often, refusal to raise the appraisal meant losing the client” [FCIC 2011: 91].
And here is the conclusion of the Black’s analysis of the Wall Street Journal article.
No bank officer was sanctioned administratively by the regulators, sued by them, or prosecuted. No enforcement action is described as being taken by the OCC against any bank. The OCC is not described as adopting any rule. The OCC is not described as having made a single criminal referral. If this is what the WSJ thinks describes a “wary” regulator’s response to a fraud epidemic then they are delusional. I have explained in prior articles that the head of the OCC is an anti-regulator who has expressly refused to make ending control frauds led by bank CEOs a regulatory priority. Note that the OCC not only failed to use the word “fraud” to describe appraisal fraud, it also attributed the endemic appraisal fraud to preposterous explanations such as insufficient staff “training” and “oversight.”
To what can we attribute the absolute refusal of regulators to see any fraud when the evidence of the fraud has been presented to them for over 14 years? What can we expect for investigations of this question from the Republican leadership of the House and the Senate in the next two years – Benghazi?
Is it any wonder that voters are disgusted with both Democrats and Republicans who cannot agree on anything except for “more money for fraudulent bankers is good for the economy”?