Lender Processing Services
DocX is a part ot of Lender Processing Services.
Lender Processing Services has three lines of business, the biggest of which is “default services', representing close to half its revenues of this over $2 bdlion in revenues.
The company DocX is its technology platform. It uses it to manage its national network of foreclosure mills. Note that Docx closed one of its offices in Alpharatta, Georgia earlier this year.
DocX
On April 12, 2010, Lender Processing Services closed the offices of its subsidiary, Docx, LLC, in Alpharetta, Georgia.
That office was responsible for pumping out over a million mortgage assignments in the last two years so that banks could foreclose on residential real estate.
The law firms handling the foreclosures were retained and largely controlled by Lender Processing Services, according to a Sanctions Order entered by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Diane Weiss Sigmund (In re Niles C Taylor. EDPA. Case 07-15385-sr, Doc. 193).
Lender Processing Senvices, the largest “default management services company” in the country, has already made at least partial admissions that there were faults in the documents produced by the Docx office — although courts and homeowners were never notified.
According to Lender Processing Services, over 50 major banks use their default management senvices.
The banks that especially need the senvices provided by Lender Processing Services include Deutsche Bank, Citibank, Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank, acting as trustees for mortgage-backed securitized trusts.
These trusts, in the rush to securitize mortgages and sell them to investors, often ignored the critical step of obtaining mortgage assignments from the original lenders to the securities companies to the trusts.
Now, years later, when the companies “senvicing” the trusts need to foreclose, they retain Lender Processing Senvices to draft the missing documents.
The mortgage senvicers, including American Home Mortgage Senvices, Saxon Mortgage Services, and American Servicing Company, never disclose that the trusts are missing essential documents — they just rely on Lender Processing Senvices to “fix” the problems.
Although the Alpharetta office has been closed. Lender Processing Services continues to mass produce “replacement” assignments from its Jacksonville, Florida, and Dakota County, Minnesota offices.
Law firms retained by Lender Processing Senvices also often use their own employees, posing as officer of Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems. to produce the needed Assignments.
So wake up and smell the coffee. The story that banks have been trying to sell has been that document problems like improper affidavits are mere technicalities.
We’ve said from the get go that they were the tip of the iceberg of widespread document forgeries and fraud.
This price sheet provides concrete proof that the practices we pointed to not only existed, but are a routine way of doing business in senvicer and trustee land.
LPS is the major platform used by all the large servicers: it oversees the work of foreclosure mills in every state.
And this means document forgeries and fraud are not just a servicer problem or a borrower problem but a mortgage industry and ultimately a policy problem.
These dishonest practices are so widespread that they raise serious questions about the residential mortgage backed securities market, the major trustees (such as JP Morgan, US Bank, Bank of New York) who repeatedly provided affirmations as required by the pooling and servicing agreement that all the tasks necessary for the trust to own the securitization assets had been completed, and the inattention of the various government bodies (in particular Fannie and Freddie) that are major clients of LPS.
Amar Bhide. in a 1994 Harvard Business Review article, said the US capital markets were the deepest and most liquid in major part because they were recognized around the world as being the fairest and best policed.
As remarkable as it may seem now, his statement was seen as an obvious truth back then. In a mere decade, we managed to allow a “free markets” ideology on steroids to gut investor and borrower protection. The result is a train wreck in US residential mortgage securities, the biggest asset class in the world.
The problems are too widespread for the authorities to pretend they don't exist, and there is no obvious way to put this Humpty Dumpty back together.