President Trump this week signed a short-term spending bill that would keep the government operating until Feb. 8, 2018. The bill ended a three-day shutdown after the previous spending authority for most of the government expired at midnight on Jan. 19. However, the threat of another shutdown looms. FHA and Ginnie Mae both had contingency plans in place in case the short-lived shutdown dragged on, as it had in 2013. That event lasted for 16 days, at a loss of $1.6 billion a day to the federal government. Under FHA’s emergency plan, the agency would continue to endorse new single-family forward mortgages, but not Home Equity Conversion Mortgages and Title I loans. Ginnie would reduce staffing to essential personnel but continue its secondary market operations. It would continue to remit timely payment of principal and interest to investors, grant commitment authority and support issuance of ...

Recoveries from FCA Settlements Involving FHA Loans Down Dramatically in 2017. The Department of Justice reported collecting more than $543 million in False Claims Act settlements and judgments to resolve housing and mortgage fraud complaints in FY 2017, down from $1.6 billion in FY 2016. The largest settlement of a False Claims Act case was $296 million, which involved an FHA lender and the DOJ. In September 2017, a unanimous jury in Houston, TX, found that Allied Home Mortgage Capital Corp. and Allied Home Mortgage Corp. violated the FCA and the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989 by falsely certifying that thousands of high-risk, poor-quality loans were eligible for FHA insurance. The companies were also accused of originating FHA loans from more than 100 “shadow” branch offices without authorization from the ...

Lennar said the mortgages funded by its affiliate were “originated and sold in prior years.”

A staggering 15.8 percent of the island commonwealth’s FHA loans were more than 90 days late as of Dec. 31, and another 13.0 percent were 30-90 days in arrears.

Several other MSR packages are expected to hit the market in the coming weeks…

The White House may be committed to GSE reform, but Republicans are not...

The nonbank share of agency servicing grew by 4.7 percentage points during 2017.

Bipartisan legislation was introduced last week in the U.S. Senate to protect veterans and service members from predatory serial refinancing by requiring lenders to show the transaction actually bene-fits the borrower.

The Trump White House was slated to nominate mortgage banker David Kittle to head the agency but back in November he grew tired of waiting and withdrew his name from consideration.

Galante is a former FHA commissioner who presently serves as faculty director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California Berkeley. She also sits on the board of Ocwen Financial.