Safeguards eased as lure of subprime profits grew

They could see the meltdown coming.

Freelance fiscal guard dogs who examined the paperwork on subprime place loans being sold to Wall Street had an interior position of the roar in easy-money loaning this decade. The referees state they raised plenty of reddish flags about flaws so serious that mortgages should have got been rejected outright — such as as borrowers' incomes that seemed inflated or written documents that looked bogus — but the jobs were glossed over, ignored or afflicted from reports.

The loan reviewers' function was just one of respective precautions — including place appraisals, loaning criteria and evaluations on mortgage-backed enslaveds — that were built into the country's mortgage-financing system. But in the concatenation of brokers, loaners and investing Banks that transformed mortgages into securities sold worldwide, no 1 seemed to care about loans that looked bad from the start. Yet net income abounded — until defaults spawned 100s of millions of dollars in losings on mortgage-backed securities.

"The investors were paying us large money to filter this business," said Cesar Valenz, one of the loan checkers.

As foreclosures mount and place terms skid, the loan reappraisal function, known as owed diligence, is gaining attention. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is conducting more than than a twelve investigations into whether companies along the funding concatenation concealed problems.

"Although marketplace participants had economical inducements to carry on owed diligence," the grouping said, "the stairway they took were insufficient." To forestall mortgage crises, the grouping recommended increased revelation of "the degree and range of owed diligence performed" on place loans implicit in the securities.

Novice reviewersAt the tallness of the subprime era, such as revelation wouldn't have got been pretty, the independent loan draughts say.

In interviews with the Los Angeles Times, eight experienced loan referees said that as edge loaning increased, measure took precedency over quality. Squads of 10 to 15 veteran soldier loan draughts gave way, they said, to battalions of 40 to 50 mostly novitiate referees posted at or near subprime mills such as as now-defunct Orange County, Calif., loaners New Century Financial Corp. and Ameriquest Mortgage Co.

Executives at the two chief companies that hired the freelancers — Shelton, Conn.-based Clayton Holdings and San Francisco-based Bohan Group — say the referees weren't there to happen every possible job with a subprime loan. Rather, the executive directors say, the occupation was to execute specific diagnostic tests to assist purchasers find how much to pay for a pool of loans. In some cases, the investors wanted only minimum testing, said Frank Filipps, Clayton's president and CEO.

"The client really drives the process," Filipps said.

Relied on softwareSubprime mortgages skyrocketed in popularity — with the volume of subprime-backed securities soaring from $13 billion in 1995 to $594 billion in 2005 and $521 billion in 2006 — and concern exploded for Clayton and Bohan.

As clip passed, Clayton and Bohan executive directors said, Wall Street companies and their investor clients accepted increasing degrees of default and fraud in subprime loans as they grew to swear software system designed to countervail those hazards by charging higher involvement rates, other fees and punishments for paying off mortgages early.

As Wall Street grew more than comfortable, it demanded less of the reappraisal process. Early in the decade, a securities company might have got asked Clayton to reexamine 25 percentage to 40 percentage of the subprime loans in a pool, compared with typically 10 percentage in 2006, although demands varied, Filipps said.

By contrast, loan purchasers who kept the mortgages as an investing instead of packaging them into securities would have got 50 percentage to 100 percentage of the loans examined, Bohan President Mark Ted Hughes said.

Little involvement in detailsThe freelancers interviewed by the Times never got the memorandum that their reappraisals were supposed to be nice and easy. Flight from metropolis to metropolis and typically paid $30 to $40 an hour, with disbursals covered, the referees state they worked conscientiously to guarantee the investing Banks and mortgage-bond investors that no surprises put in the files.

Loan referee Jana Lujan recalled showing a data file to a supervisor in 2004, during a depository financial institution check of subprime mortgages made by a Brea, Calif., bank that regulators later cited for unsound lending. A statute title study showed a taxation lien on the property.

"I said we needed grounds it had been paid off and released," to guarantee against foreclosure, Lujan said. "And he said: 'Just travel ahead. Assume it's being taken attention of.' "

Lujan said one Clayton supervisor would throw away written documents that appeared to have got been altered fraudulently. The deficiency of a written document in the data file meant the loan had to be sold at a flimsy discount, she said, but it still could be sold.

Lujan, Valenz and one other loan checker said supervisors at Clayton and Bohan also would change the manner fees were described so that mortgages would not be red-flagged as potentially marauding under U.S. law.

Filipps said he wasn't aware that anyone at Clayton had changed fee classes to convey loans into compliance. He said discarding written documents had never been brought to his attention.

At Bohan, Ted Hughes said he had heard of lenders, but not employees of loan-review companies, throwing written documents away. He described efforts to change fee categorizations as not unheard of in the industry, but he added that Bohan didn't endure such as misrepresentations.

New House Of York Lawyer General Saint Andrew Cuomo, who is investigating some facets of the mortgage debacle, have given Clayton unsusceptibility from prosecution in tax return for aid in learning whether debt-rating outfits and investors obtained enough information about the loans being sold.

The greatest problems, the referees said, were assessments that looked inflated and "liar's loans," so nicknamed because borrowers weren't required to turn out they earned enough to do their payments.

"You can't state me A Kmart Oregon a Wal-Mart or a Target flooring worker is making $5,000 a month, or a house cleansing agent is making $10,000," said former loan referee Irma Aninger of Palm Desert, Calif., a 40-year fiscal services industry veteran.

Aninger, who did work for Clayton and Bohan, said she tried repeatedly to have got such as loans marked as unacceptable but was overruled by supervisors. "The Pb would say, 'You can't make that. You can't name these people liars,' " Aninger said.