No surprise here…
Despite a public promise and Presidential directive to crack down on mortgage fraud along with a $196 million funding increase to do so, a new report by the internal watchdog at the US Department of Justice (DOJ) finds that the Justice Department made mortgage crime one of its lowest priorities while overstating its success in prosecuting such cases.
The report released last week calls into question the agency’s stated commitment to hold people accountable for misconduct that precipitated the financial crisis.
The FBI considered mortgage fraud “as the lowest ranked criminal threat in its lowest crime category,” between 2009 and 2011, and by 2011, the number of agents investigating cases had fallen, as did the number of pending cases:
“DOJ and its components have repeatedly stated publicly that mortgage fraud is a high priority and during this audit we found some examples of DOJ-led efforts that supported those claims,” the inspector general wrote. “However, we also determined during this audit that DOJ did not uniformly ensure that mortgage fraud was prioritized at a level commensurate with its public statements.” You can see the full report here: Audit of the Department of Justice’s Efforts to Address Mortgage Fraud.
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