He Spent So Many Hours Writing His Name That His Signature Morphed Into A Series Of Four Circles Overlapping One Another.
From CNN Money.com –
The paperwork he robo-signed most often were the notices to delinquent borrowers that the servicer was proceeding to foreclosure. By signing that document, he was affirming that the bank had reviewed the loan and it didn’t qualify for a modification. But, he said, the reality was he had no idea whether Bank of America had really tried to save the borrower’s home.
“We had no knowledge of whether the foreclosure could proceed or couldn’t, but regardless, we signed the documents to get these foreclosures out of the way,” he said, noting that he assumed another department had checked that the review was done.
In his final weeks on the job, a notary routinely left him stacks of 20-page files, each one with a tab indicating where he needed to sign or initial. He had no idea what those documents were.
He spent so many hours writing his name that his signature morphed into a series of four circles overlapping one another. He said that he and his co-workers joked that they got so used to the rapid-fire signatures that they started signing personal paperwork that way.
There was no examination of whether or not the homeowner qualified for a modification. That was not fair. The bank failed in its duty to its customers and stockholders. Stockholders? Yes, the banks would make more over time with modifications.
When we talk about a mortgage holder qualifying for a modification, we’re not talking about whether or not the holder is a good person or a bad one, the criteria are designed to tell the bank that they make more money renegotiating than not.
We are not talking about the bank doing a homeowner a favor. We are talking about a bank ignoring its own procedures and its own profits.
From further down in the article –
Now that he’s not in the thick of the foreclosure process, Doan said he has had time to reflect on what his actions meant. Each signature likely led to a borrower losing his or her home. While he got numb to that fact while he was on the job, he now feels guilty.
“I shudder to think how many foreclosure documents have my name on it,” he said.
It was needlessly cruel to deny borrowers the opportunity to renegotiate. It was a failure of ethical judgment and of the principles of basic fairness.
James Pilant
I’ve been a consistent critic of MERS, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems. I consider incredible that the mortgage industry could set up this monstrosity which was in violation of state laws across the nation without trying to get some legislation from somebody somewhere to at least give it some iota of legality. Instead they just adopted it with an ethical sense very similar to listing your five grey tabby cats as children on your income tax. As far as I’m concerned, MERS is a semi-sorta legal device used to evade paying state registration fees and avoiding the basic work of transferring title by paper and all this so that these mortgages could be used as chips in global speculation.
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
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