Federal mortgage giant Fannie Mae was told in 2006 about faulty court documents filed by Florida foreclosure attorneys acting on its behalf but did nothing to correct the practices, an inspector general found.

A report issued Friday by the Federal Housing Finance Agency Office of Inspector General said an outside law firm Fannie Mae hired to investigate allegations of wrongdoing confirmed “unlawful” practices and stated that foreclosure attorneys were sacrificing accuracy for speed by filing false documents.

After learning of the attorney misconduct in 2006, Fannie Mae failed to make any improvements in its oversight of the firms.

“Strengthened law firm oversight by Fannie Mae could have detected – if not prevented – these abuses by attorneys,” the report said.

Florida foreclosure defense attorneys agreed, pointing to the morass that followed last fall’s revelation of robo-signed documents and other faulty paperwork, some of which was produced by Florida’s so-called foreclosure mills.

“If action were taken sooner, we would have avoided a lot of this instead of muddying up the public land records in tens of thousands of cases,” said attorney Tom Ice of Ice Legal in Royal Palm Beach. “It goes without saying that if someone did something to stop the fraud, it would have benefited everyone.”

The complete article can be found here: Fannie Mae ignored robo-signing abuses in Florida foreclosures, investigation finds.