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This is regarding the MERS registration system, and is a slide off of Q but Since Qitizens prefer to be well rounded and well informed....

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mortgage-electronic-registration-system-mers.asp

“The database has drawn some criticism though because, during the 2008 housing crisis, the system made it difficult at times to sort out who actually owned mortgages. That created a challenge for homeowners facing foreclosure or relief from their loans, as they needed to know who held their mortgages in order to work out some form of remedy.”

MERS is a property registration based on the system used for Ship registration.

Problems with the system:
See:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1684729

Two Faces: Demystifying the Mortgage Electronic Registration System’s Land Title Theory

Extract/

116 WILLIAM AND MARY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 53:111

“Snip... In the mid-1990s, some mortgage bankers decided they no longer wanted to pay recording fees for assigning mortgages.20 Securitization-a process of pooling many mortgages into a trust and selling income from the trust to investors on Wall Street21-drove this decision. Securitization, also sometimes called “structured finance,” usually required several successive mortgage assignments to different companies.22 To avoid the hassle and expense of paying county recording fees, these mortgage bankers formed a plan to create a single shell company that would pretend to own all the mortgages in the country.23 According to the plan, the mortgage bankers would never have to record assignments again because the same company would always “own” all the mortgages.24 They incor-porated the shell company in Delaware and called it Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc.25 Even though not a single state legislature or appellate court had authorized this-change in real property recording, investors inter-ested in subprime and exotic mortgage-backed securities were still willing to buy mortgages recorded through this new proxy system.

Because the new system cut out payment of county recording fees, recording was significantly cheaper for intermediary mortgage companies and the investment banks that packaged mortgage securities. Acting on the impulse to maximize profits by avoiding payment of fees to county governments, much of the national residential mortgage market shifted to the new proxy recording system in only a few years. Now, about 60 percent of the nation’s residential mortgages are recorded in the name of MERS Inc., rather than the bank, trust, or company that actually has a meaningful economic interest in the repayment of the debt. 27 For the first time in the nation’s history, there is no longer an authoritative, public record of who owns land in each county. Instead, MERSCORP Inc., a company closely affiliated with MERS Inc., now maintains an electronic database that tracks mortgage servicing rights-in other words, the right of a company to collect monthly payments on behalf of the actual economic owner or owners of a loan. In lieu of paying county governments, financial institutions pay MERSCORP membership fees and per-transaction fees for access to the MERS database and to compensate MERS Inc. for pretending to own the mortgages these financial institutions register on the MERSCORP database.28 Sometimes MERSCORP also tracks beneficial ownership rights-actual assignments-but only if investors willingly volunteer this information.29 Financial institutions have been cavalier about informing MERSCORP of changes in servicing and ownership rights of mortgages, apparently because these institutions believe no legal penalties exist for neglecting to make this information available.....Snip)

If someone wants to do a deep dive, you can access this PDF that discussess the problem.

I believe that some one did something with an Executive order that said that what was done was ok and nobody could sue the banks for what they did. (The Faux president) Someone else will need to research the action that he took because I will be going to bed!