This time MERS has totally stepped in it.

MERS (Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems) has really got themselves in a major jam in Massachusetts.   Based upon recent court rulings, the Essex County Clerk began looking at mortgages registered in that county by MERS.  Upon a detailed look at only a few mortgages, the clerk realized that MERS had transferred each mortgage several times, but had failed to pay the required filing fee for each.

That may not seem to be a big deal.  After all, it's only one county in Massachusetts that is in the news now for having reviewed to see if MERS was in fact failing to pay a state mandated filing fee.  So why say anything at all?

Seriously, how many counties are there?  And how many mortgages could we be talking about?

Well here's why it's a big deal.  In that one county in Massachusetts, the clerk estimated that MERS failed to pay over $22 MILLION in filing fees.  Yes, you read that correctly - MERS may owe over twenty-two million dollars in filing fees to only one county.  And it's not even the county with the Metro Boston area in it!

A bit of online research shows that the population of Essex County is around 742,582.  The population of the entire US is 310,876,112.  According to Wikipedia, there are 3140 counties in the United States. You can see the average county only has a population of just over 99,000 people (total pop divided by total counties).  This means that the population of Essex county is 7 1/2 times the average population of each county.  If you divide $22million by 7.5, then multiply by the number of counties in the entire country, wouldn't that give you a ballpark idea of what MERS avoided paying in filing fees nationwide?  It's a huge number.  {well over $9.2 trillion}

My guess is that MERS will fight having to pay anyone any filing fees tooth and nail, and if ordered to pay, will likely first try to pass the filing fees on to their members, and/or the individual homeowners.  And I bet if it is rolled (or should I say when) over to the homeowners, it will be just added to the amount they owe with no notice to anyone.

Or maybe the court will so hammer MERS they file bankruptcy and the system crashes.