How to gain truth from a document 2: Own hand and Signatures, foreclosures
The halls of justice require diligence in order to serve the people
The Science of Auditing paperwork in foreclosures
Just about 3 years ago I was working on a litigation matter that involved a million dollar home. It was a foreclosure matter. The lender/servicer had done some things wrong but they were curable. The homeowner was sure he had been bamboozled and that the house was really only worth 750k. We hired a fancy lawyer and got to work on the case. The lawyer did very little as we tried out some pre-litigation strategies. We took the lender to task and demanded all paperwork evidencing any debt, worth of house and chain of title. And then of course we set out to find the documents from alternative sources, public and private.
Yikes I just read this again and was scared by my bombastic lecturing style.
This was supposed to be about normal logical stuff that brought the truth closer to home. Well read on and get a belly full. It kind of needs to be said and understood. I reckon this hub is not for the ignorant.
Forensic Audit. That sounds very heady and complicated but it is not. Forensic is just the application of scientific principles to matters that have a role in the issuance of justice. Most of the science used in documentation is just good common sense, however we like to say logic. Logic is in fact a science, it has all kinds of laws and mathematical equations to set up a structure of examination of a proposed fact and is usually quite accurate. Sorry to say it is not for the weak minded and is really difficult to apply well. That paper has a watermark that seriously predates (1907)the matrix printer that printed on it. Therefore who ever and whenever they printed this document had access to paper that was very old and so it was not printed near the time of production of the paper. Dot matrix supplies a working timeline and the paper a suggestion of who and where. Extrapolation from there requires more. This does not suggest that someone had a dot matrix printer in 1907. You see it is just common sense by applying the science of logic.
Can you do it?
Have you ever really sat down and read a 4,000 word legal document that you signed?
The first one is sticks and pebbles that will not break my bones.
If consistency is found in the numbers, cool, if perfect consistency - watch out!
Audit is a term most of us associate with strict accounting principles and mathematics. Of course that is part of a forensic audit but the most important part of an audit is logical binary consistency in the paper trail. This includes numbers “adding up”, percentages being right and dates that reflect appropriate summation of numbers. It is way cool. A little bit lopsided against big corporations. Did you know that at best 6 times out of 10 times your grocery store checkout has errors? Think of the millions of calculations a day that are compiled by lenders! How often do they have it right?
Documents are frail. So I worked with a guy on alleged defaulted student loans from the 70’s and 80’s, and by golly the accusers of this alleged debt could not produce a reasonable facsimile of any document that proved he was a debtor at all. I would say that at least 100 times in my short life I have encountered lenders that claim a debt is owed without any provable documentation at all. But people pay to protect their credit so even highly dubious claims of debt are paid with no proof of the debt. Maybe they all owe or maybe not.
Justice is not a right or privilege, Justice is earned.
The crazy folks calling fowl, turned out to be right. Attorney Generals in all fifty sates agreed.
Back to my friend with the foreclosure problem. Everything came in perfect. All the numbers added up and all the signatures were there and the timeline followed right on the money. My guy was dead in his tracts. (pun intended) I laid my weary head down on my examining table to catch some shut eye. And a vision popped in my mind. A signature and a name. Where had I seen that before and when? Wow! In two different client files. And they were not the same lender. Now I relooked at an assignment the lender made to another lender and then a subsequent transfer to a trustee. Wow the same signatory belonged to all three companies. Again I reflected on all the numbers being perfect, almost impossible.
You see the signatures were real. The numbers were perfectly correct. But how could one person work for three competing companies. Well they were Robosigners. People actually paid around minimum wage to sign carefully drafted documents all day long, they were even given Vice President Statuses and because of the inbreeding of large lenders they appeared to be working for several competing companies simultaneously.
So a science based approach to the auditing of documents was doomed to failure. But a major fraud in the industry was detected almost simultaneously by forensic people across our nation. The science did not reveal it but the human factor caught the problem.
Proof of legitimacy of a document can be evasive. Proving a document is fraudulent can be near impossible. But all matters of human concern are open to the powers of observation and reasonable deductions stemming there from. Proving the truth of a matter alleged in a document should be easy enough. But in today’s mega corporation reality, do not believe what you read, do a forensic audit on your own credit card statements and utility bills. If there is a mistake, point it out. If there is no mistake, scratch your head and wonder.
I am still just that little bitty baby.
Life is good when you are alive. Truth is when you can feel your legs.
Friends: Truth is when you have eyes to see.
Mostly it is lack of looking that prevents us from finding truth. Normally we just do not care to look and that is fine. Except when it isn't. Buy a pair of reading glasses and start looking at things for what they really are not what we just accept.
Watch out!
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