The Southern Essex County Register of Deeds has voluntarily had a forensic examiner audit all mortgages registered in 2010 – and that audit suggests that more than 75 percent of the mortgages registered in the county by the three of the largest home lenders in the commonwealth are invalid.
The 473 mortgages examined in the audit had a combined 683 missing assignments, costing the register hundreds of thousands in lost recording fees. More than a third of the flawed assignments have signatures from known "robo-signers," while others have been obviously backdated or purport to transfer the mortgage to a bank which does not own it, the audit alleges. JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of America were the subjects of the investigation.
"My registry is a crime scene as evidenced by this forensic examination," said John O’Brien in a statement. "This crime that has affected thousands of homeowners in Essex County who, through no fault of their own, have had their property rights trampled on and their chain of title compromised."
The audit was prepared by Marie McDonnell, a mortgage fraud and forensic analyst and principal of Orleans-based McDonnell Property Analytics, a litigation support and research firm. McDonnell previously filed an amicus brief on behalf of the homeowners in the landmark Ibanez case, in which the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that improper mortgage assignments could invalidate a foreclosure.
McDonnell said she was "shocked" by the breadth of the problems her audit uncovered, and said more attention needs to be paid to the officials who have the authority to help resolve the problems.
"I’d like to get Gov. Patrick, [Secretary of the Commonwealth William] Galvin, and [Attorney General Martha] Coakley in a room where I could show them the problems with these documents," she said.
As for the banks who submitted the flawed assignments, she suggested perhaps the stocks.
"It’s time for them to admit what they did. It’s going to cost a lot money, but we need to fix this," to restore the integrity of the land records.
The effort is the latest move in a long-standing public campaign by Register O’Brien and his assistant, Kevin Harvey, to draw more attention to problems in the land records.
Ed Bloom, president of the Massachusetts Real Estate Bar Association, questioned whether a mere examination of the public land records would be sufficient to determine whether the assignments were flawed. The SJC ruled in Ibanez that in the case of a foreclosure it would be possible for a lender to file a "confirmatory" assignment, post-recording, provided it could offer evidence that the note had been transferred to it.
"It’s not [the register’s] role to be a public ombudsman" and police the documents sent to the registry to be recorded, Bloom said.
