Former Countrywide Whistleblower: Mortgage Fraud 'Systemic'

With mortgage lenders now facing allegations of misconduct on several fronts, a former top ranking employee at a major home lender has come forward saying fraud at her firm wasn't the exception, but the norm.

Eileen Foster, a former executive vice president in charge of fraud investigations at mortgage lender Countrywide Financial, told CBS 60 Minutes reporter Steve Kroft that mortgage fraud was a common occurrence at the firm. Foster goes on to say that she faced illegal retaliation for filing reports investigating the fraud, alleging Countrywide fired her when she refused to lie to federal regulators on Countrywide's behalf.

"From what I saw, the types of things I saw, it was, it appeared systemic," Foster said on 60 Minutes Sunday. "It wasn't just one individual or two or three individuals, it was branches of individuals, it was regions of individuals."

Countrywide Financial, acquired by Bank of America in 2008, was a central figure in the housing collapse and subsequent foreclosure crisis. Once America's largest mortgage lender, the company has agreed to a litany of settlements since 2008, including a $600 million class-action settlement, an $108 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission and the ousting of former CEO Angelo Mozilo, who paid $67.5 million in penalties to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Countrywide protected fraudsters by silencing whistleblowers, say former employees

In the summer of 2007, a team of corporate investigators sifted through mounds of paper pulled from shred bins at Countrywide Financial Corp. mortgage shops in and around Boston.

By intercepting the documents before they were sliced by the shredder, the investigators were able to uncover what they believed was evidence that branch employees had used scissors, tape and Wite-Out to create fake bank statements, inflated property appraisals and other phony paperwork. Inside the heaps of paper, for example, they found mock-ups that indicated to investigators that workers had, as a matter of routine, literally cut and pasted the address for one home onto an appraisal for a completely different piece of property.

Eileen Foster, the company’s new fraud investigations chief, had seen a lot of slippery behavior in her two-plus decades in the banking business. But she’d never seen anything like this.

“You’re looking at it and you’re going, Oh my God, how did it get to this point?” Foster recalls. “How do you get people to go to work every day and do these things and think it’s okay?”

More surprises followed. She began to get pushback, she claims, from company officials who were unhappy with the investigation.