“The Justice Department’s much ballyhooed battle against mortgage fraud in the years following the 2008 housing meltdown was mostly a sham, with gross exaggerations about its success from top government officials including Attorney General Eric Holder, according to The Fiscal Times.
The department’s own Office of the Inspector General (OIG), an internal agency watchdog, studied the results of the government’s mortgage industry investigations in the wake of the economic disaster that still haunts many Americans.
What the OIG found was that the Justice Department did not assign the high priority to mortgage fraud that was commonly believed, the Times said. To the contrary, the Justice Department’s FBI “ranked mortgage fraud as the lowest ranked criminal threat in its lowest crime category,” according to the OIG.
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In fact, through the FBI received $196 million to battle mortgage fraud from 2009 through 2011, the agency actually reduced the number of agents assigned to the matter and the number of pending investigations.
The Fiscal Times reported that “perhaps the most damning finding to emerge” from an OIG audit came at a 2012 news conference in which Holder maintained that 530 people had been charged with mortgage fraud the previous year, including 172 executives, and that 110 civil cases had been launched – a major undertaking involving $1 billion in losses and 73,000 “homeowner victims.
But after months of prodding from the OIG, the Justice Department admitted that only 107 people had been charged with mortgage fraud, and the losses added up to just $95 million…..”
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