Illinois Regulator Fines Mortgage Servicer Over Altered Foreclosure Affidavits, Robosigned Documents

From the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation:

• PHH Mortgage Company has been fined $290,000 for signing foreclosure affidavits that the company knew would later be altered by its attorneys and for signing affidavits using someone else’s name, according to an order released today by the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation (IDFPR). The violations were found during an ongoing special investigation of 20 Illinois licensed mortgage servicing companies, which was launched last year after learning of foreclosure improprieties across the country.

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• The order, signed by Manuel Flores, Director of IDFPR’s Division of Banking says that in at least 19 files, PHH failed to sign affidavits after they had been altered by the company’s attorneys and that PHH’s knowledge of and complicity with this process is evidenced by the fact that the original affidavits were incomplete and contained notations such as “will add” when they were tendered to the law firm of Fisher and Shapiro. The law firm, in turn, under penalty of perjury and acting on behalf of PHH, then attested to the completeness of the altered affidavits although they had not been reviewed or re-executed by PHH.
• The Department discovered other evidence of improprieties on the part of PHH employees in 16 of the 19 affidavits. These 16 affidavits were identified as having all been signed and attested to by the same PHH employee in his or her official capacity. Yet, the Department noted no less than five distinctly different signatures attributed to this same PHH employee, leading the Department to conclude that at least four different people used one employee’s name to sign the affidavits. PHH has ten days to request a hearing on the Department’s order.(1)

For the IDFPR press release, see Mortgage Company fined $290,000 for Incomplete and False Foreclosure Documents.

(1) See Chicago Tribune: Company in foreclosure document probe to dispute fine.