Should Lenders Be Allowed to Robo Sign?

For those who don't know, robo signing is a recently uncovered practice in the mortgage servicing industry during foreclosures and bankruptcies.

Here's what happens:  an employee of the company wishing to foreclose on a particular piece of real property is tasked with signing affidavits to be attached to documents to be submitted to various courts. 

Here's the problem:  the employee is given so many documents to sign it would take forever to review and verify the contents of each document.

And here is what robo signing is: the employee, under pressure to produce, just verifies that the correct party names are on the document (perhaps checks the amount due against a computer screen, or the name of the court, case no...other incidentals)  and after spending a couple minutes with the document, signs it, puts it into a pile and goes on to the next document.  And the next, and the next.


Of course the affidavit says that he has verified the contents thereof, and it is all true and correct, but don't worry about that.  We got a lot done. Right?

Oh yes, one more thing.  The affidavit has to have a notarized signature. So off the entire pile goes to have another person notarize them.  Not in their presence as it says, perhaps not on the same day, or even in the same building (or even in the same state) but it gets notarized. [I believe sometimes the notarization comes first, but can't prove that right now.]

In any event, the mortgage companies, the servicing agents, the trustees for the securitized trusts all agree they should be allowed to robo sign, or at the very minimum, have the robo signed documents replaced with new ones that someone now verifies.

So the question is - should robo signing be allowed?  After all, everyone from White House advisers to mortgage industry spokesmen say that it would HURT the housing industry to slow down foreclosures in this country.  So what is the big deal if a person didn't verify every detail of each document they signed?

First and foremost, they lied to the court.  And that is a huge big deal to me.  If you  are allowed to lie to the courts, the entire system breaks down.

Isn't that reason enough to make sure that those who are swearing to the court that they verified the issues contained in a document actually did so?

So I say TELL THE TRUTH. If you are going to swear to the court under penalty of perjury that you did in fact do something, be sure you did in fact do that thing first.

Is that so hard?