What can we expect from new DOJ/SEC/state AG task force on MBS?

The benefits of creating an umbrella task force to oversee investigations already underway by state and federal regulators aren’t clear to me from the task force’s announcements. There will apparently be additional resources dedicated to MBS fraud. Holder said that there are now 15 DOJ lawyers, investigators, and analysts working on MBS matters. They will be supplemented right away with 10 FBI agents, and another 30 DOJ staffers will join the team “in the coming weeks.” Khuzami and the DOJ also said the task force will enhance coordination and streamline processes. “It will ensure that we pool the different capabilities, resources, legal theories and remedies that each of us bring to the effort,” Khuzami’s press release said.

Okay, streamlining is good. So is the apparent expansion of the state AGs’ mandate. “We have jurisdiction to go after every aspect of the mortgage bubble and the crash of the financial market,” Schneiderman said at the press conference, according to Housing Wire. (Here’s the AG’s press release.) “We have jurisdiction over every MBS issued over the last decade with Delaware and New York joining the group.” As if to underline that point, the task force announced that in recent days it has subpoenaed 11 financial institutions.

But the AGs, according to a DOJ spokesperson, won’t have any greater prosecutorial reach via the task force than they already have in their own states. “Membership in the RMBS Working Group will not empower state Attorneys General to enforce any statute that they could not otherwise enforce,” the DOJ told me in an email. “The Working Group and its federal and state co-chairs will coordinate investigations and make decisions about which office or offices should conduct various pieces of these investigations and which should be done jointly depending on the facts, the law and the jurisdiction.”

Full report here…

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