I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
Kent, Muskegon, Ottawa and Kalamazoo counties posted increases in foreclosure court filings for the month of May, but are still trailing actions from a year ago.
The Grand Rapids Press reports that California based RealtyTrac has posted the numbers.
RealtyTrac CEO James J. Saccacio said problems with processing continue to play a role in foreclosure filing totals.
“Lenders are somewhat unevenly pushing batches of bad loans through foreclosure as they overhaul their paperwork and documentation procedures and as they determine that some local markets are able to absorb more foreclosure inventory,” he said in a statement.
Of course this push through of bad loans as well as paperwork issues could damage foreclosure activities. A large number of documents in the state have come under increasing scrutiny after Ingham County Register of Deeds Curtis Hertel, Jr. identified documents from the robo-signing operation DocX. Hertel’s discovery led to a state and federal investigations — and Hertel has even filed criminal complaints in Georgia where DocX was operating.
On Wednesday, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette announced he has issued subpoenas for several mortgage processing companies as part of his ongoing probe into DocX robo-signing.
On top of the DocX robo-signing scandal, the Michigan Electronic Registration Systems (MERS) has also come under fire. That organization was created in order to streamline documentation processes in selling of mortgages. When a mortgage is sold to another company, the sale has to be registered with a mortgage assignment document. MERS told customers that they could sign up for their system and avoid filing fees and delays in processing mortgage assignments with registers of deeds in the state. Now, however, many of those cases are coming up short on the documentation necessary to show which entity actually owns the mortgage and has the right to foreclose.
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