Hey County Clerks: Want in on a cool billion?

As Paul Newman, playing Butch Cassidy, said about financial institutions in Australia, the mortgage fraudster banks are "easy, ripe and luscious."

From Zandar:

John Carney again, this time discovering the side effect of banks using MERS to fake paperwork: leaving county clerks (and more importantly county clerk fees) out of the loop. Guess what? Broke-ass counties want their money, and guys like Massachusetts Recorder of Deeds for South Essex John O'Brien are going to get what MERS owes.

“It’s a basic issue of fairness. MERS says that if you are a member of their club, you can avoid fees on assignments of mortgages forever. Those are fees that everyone else pays,” O’Brien said. “I’ve never before heard of a private company that has attempted to unilaterally take over such a public function as property recordation. Imagine if someone tried to do this with drivers licenses.”

O’Brien has asked Coakley to investigate whether MERS may owe fees for recordation it has avoided. He is taking this very seriously.

“I intend to pursue this as vigorously as the banks pursue a consumer who doesn’t pay a fee. If you don’t pay them, they’ll pursue you to the gates of Hell,” he said.

O’Brien, who was named “Public Official of the Year in 2000 by the National Association of County Recorders Election Officials and Clerks, is unimpressed by MERS’s official response to his request for an investigation.

“Massachusetts has very clear cut rules. Recordation is not optional. It’s mandatory. It cannot be avoided,” he said.

Hell hath no fury like a public bureaucrat scorned. D-Day picks up the story from here:

This is a shoe that hadn’t yet dropped – the evasion of fees by the banks using MERS. County governments are as cash-strapped as virtually every other government entity, and MERS’ entire reason for being is to strip them of land title recording fees, which they’ve been doing for over a decade. Massachusetts happens to have extremely precise recording laws, and thus this is the best place to start this new front in the war on the corrupt banks. MERS would be liable for billions, and they’re owned by the big banks (and the GSEs), so that money would transfer over.

You'd better believe just about every other deed clerk and registrar's office is going to want to have a little talk with MERS about ten years of back fees owed for every mortgage transaction they've made.

The banks are in mortal peril, folks. And they damn well know it. They got Capone on tax evasion, after all.