A more general point is in order.  Atlanta is the culmination of destructive national trends and failing to mention Houston in the story was unfortunate.  First, the “reinventing government” movement decided the public sector was bad and the private sector was magnificent and said that the public sector should adopt private sector approaches including quite specifically “performance pay” based on quantitative measures.  This brought to the public sector the perverse incentives that were ruining the private sector and about to bring on Enron-era fraud epidemic and then the most recent three fraud epidemics.  Second, we were assured by proponents of the change that a concern for “reputation” would trump any perverse incentives.  What the proponents failed to see, of course, was that in both the private and public sectors the way to create a superb reputation was to report inflated data.  Reputation, instead of the “trump” ensuring good conduct, was…

The mortgage chicanery spotlight is once again focused on Wells Fargo & Co. and Ocwen Financial Corp. A federal False Claims Act whistleblower complaint unsealed yesterday claims that Ocwen, the nation’s largest mortgage servicer, was double dipping and keeping monies that should have been paid to Fannie Mae.

Ocwen Financial Corp. Facing Mortgage Servicer Fraud Case
Ocwen Financial Corp. is a leading mortgage servicer that services an estimated 1 million mortgages, collecting payments of behalf of banks and other entities. Mortgage servicers have taken over this function for many of the major banks and litigation asserting misconduct within the mortgage servicer industry abounds.

According to filers, Mr. and Mrs. Schiano, who filed the False Claims Act complaint in September in the Southern District of New York, Ocwen and Wells Fargo pocketed the payoff money derived from the Schianos refinancing their home mortgage and also reported a default to U.S. government…