Nincompoops After All

Who hasn't been on the phone with a rep from a credit card company, bank, or mortgage servicer and had trouble with the rep not understanding a basic point. You've tried to boil it all down so that a third grader could understand, but the voice on the other side of the line sounds as perplexed as ever. At some point, you think to yourself, "This person is a complete nincompoop!"

As it turns out in light of the growing story regarding "foreclosure-gate," you might not have been off base at all!

In an effort to rush through thousands of home foreclosures since 2007, financial institutions and their mortgage servicing departments hired hair stylists, Walmart floor workers and people who had worked on assembly lines and installed them in "foreclosure expert" jobs with no formal training, a Florida lawyer says.

In depositions released Tuesday, many of those workers testified that they barely knew what a mortgage was. Some couldn't define the word "affidavit." Others didn't know what a complaint was, or even what was meant by personal property. Most troubling, several said they knew they were lying when they signed the foreclosure affidavits and that they agreed with the defense lawyers' accusations about document fraud...

No one should be surprised by these admissions. The best way for a big company to keep expenses down is to control labor costs. Skilled labor costs considerably more than unskilled labor. So, if you think you can get away with it, unskilled labor is the way to go.

The depositions paint a surreal picture of foreclosure experts who didn't understand even the most elementary aspects of the mortgage or foreclosure process -- even though they were entrusted as the records custodians of homeowners' loans. In one deposition taken in Houston, a foreclosure supervisor with Litton Loan couldn't define basic terms like promissory note, mortgagee, lien, receiver, jurisdiction, circuit court, plaintiff's assignor or defendant. She testified that she didn't know why a spouse might claim interest in a property, what the required conditions were for a bank to foreclose or who the holder of the mortgage note was. "I don't know the ins and outs of the loan, I just sign documents," she said at one point...