County hires firm to investigate filings

NORMAN — Cleveland County commissioners on Monday hired a law firm to investigate whether a banking system systematically failed to pay mortgage filing fees to the county clerk.

Commissioners Rod Cleveland and Rusty Sullivan said national banking companies joined the Mortgage Electronic Registration System (MERS) Inc., a private enterprise that started in 1997, to handle records of mortgage transactions.

The problem, Cleveland said, is that “any time a mortgage is touched, any transaction at all, then there should be a filing fee paid to the county.”

MERS keeps records electronically, so there is no paper involved.

But Cleveland said there are national estimates of MERS handling about 60 percent of mortgage transactions, and Cleveland County had about 55,000 of them between 1999 and 2009.

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