[While I was there, one branch in California was “caught” falsifying APPRAISALS!!]
There were Appraisers in the Argent (Ameriquest's wholesale division) Database who'd been caught, flagged, and "suspended"... multiple times.Argent also had a process of appraisal checks intended to flag an application for "corporate review"; but loan applications were consistently APPROVED before the results of that review were ever returned. It was a facade. I know because I wrote the webservice responsible for communicating with the outside auditor - and I observed how the results were and WERE NOT being used.The icing on the fraudulent cake was the Empower(tm)ing of FICO scores on "Liar Loans" to be completely, DELIBERATELY, fabricated.Result? AAA ratings based upon fudged appraisals / phony FICO scores.... and....Bubbletime with Benny and Barry
[but the investors and the market with that one!!]
Gaming the system.... and why not - when the rules of the Republic had been reduced to this:"We didn't truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market," says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency -- the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC] -- who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country's key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis. "They were totally opposed to it," Born says. "That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?"
