In April 2006, Rachel Steinmetz, a senior loan underwriter at GreenPoint Mortgage Funding, flagged a loan application supported, she said, by a trio of frauds — overstated income, an overstated appraisal and a fake tenant lease agreement.
She suspended and then declined the loan.
Later she discovered that, while she’d been out of the office for Passover, someone had taken the opportunity to circumvent her decision and get the loan moving again, Steinmetz said in a lawsuit in federal court in New York.
She protested to a manager, Steinmetz said, but GreenPoint funded the loan.
This sort of cat-and-mouse game was typical in GreenPoint’s Manhattan branch, Steinmetz claimed. During the nine months she worked at the branch in 2005 and 2006, her suit alleged, managers used a variety of methods to get suspicious loans approved.
One manager’s frequent refrain, she said, was that she needed to approve a loan today because she’d declined one the day before: “You owe me.”
An operations manager, she said, told her: “Stop looking so carefully at the appraisals — just skim them! This branch has to maintain a 24-hour turn-around time on loans.”
Another manager, she claimed, told her to approve a suspicious loan because it was one of the first deals put together by a new loan officer “and she can use the encouragement.”
After Steinmetz uncovered evidence of fraud on loans submitted by a mortgage broker based in Florida, the suit said, one of her bosses became irate, telling her “you must approve these loans” because the broker was opening a New York office and he wanted to make sure it sent GreenPoint’s Manhattan branch “a lot of business. So do what needs to get done!”
The pressures became so intolerable, she charged, that she was forced into an “involuntary resignation” in June 2006.
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