As slipshod bookkeeping by some big mortgage lenders continued to rattle the housing market on Thursday, another major lender indicated it would suspend sales of foreclosed homes and White House officials said President Obama would not sign a bill that critics suggested could facilitate foreclosure fraud.
Demands for investigations and nationwide moratoriums also grew. Representative Edolphus Towns, the New York Democrat who is chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, called on lenders to voluntarily suspend foreclosures until they completed internal investigations. On Wednesday, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said that the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, which Mr. Obama created to examine financial fraud, is looking at the growing reports of foreclosure fraud.
The president’s pocket veto — rejecting a bill by withholding his signature while Congress is away — effectively kills the measure since lawmakers, who are out of town until after the Nov. 2 midterm elections, are not in position to override his decision with a two-thirds vote of the House and Senate.
The bill would have mandated that notarizations of mortgages and other financial documents done in one state, including those done electronically, be recognized in other states. By the time the bill arrived at Mr. Obama’s desk, however, it was caught in the controversy over major institutions’ acknowledgment of problems in processing documents for tens of thousands of foreclosures. Those included suspected forgeries and notaries’ failure to review the paperwork as required.
Critics, particularly consumer groups, said the measure for interstate notarizations would have made it even easier for banks and other lenders to rush the foreclosure process. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and GMAC Mortgage have stopped foreclosures in nearly half the states, pending investigations into the process.
