A startling report just issued by the Inspector General of the Justice Department entitled “AUDIT OF THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE’S EFFORTS TO ADDRESS MORTGAGE FRAUD” concludes that complex financial crimes were the lowest priority for the criminal division.
Here is one of the report’s conclusions: “We found that, despite public statements by the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force and the department about the importance of pursuing financial fraud cases, including mortgage fraud cases, the F.B.I. Criminal Investigative Division ranked complex financial crimes the lowest subcategory threat within the complex financial crimes category. Additionally, we found mortgage fraud to be a low priority, or not even listed as a priority, for F.B.I. field offices in the locations we visited including Baltimore, Los Angeles, Miami, and New York.”
According to the report, even when investigators decided to pursue cases, they would up closing many of them after doing little work. For example, the F.B.I. field offices closed 747 mortgage fraud cases without prosecution and with “little or no investigation conducted.
The question which hasn’t been answered by the I.G. report is why and why hasn’t Congress done anything about it?
