FRANKFORT, KY – Attorney General Andy Beshear today announced that his office is providing county clerks with critical information to post in their offices for Kentuckians seeking online home mortgage details.
Beshear’s recent multimillion-dollar settlement with national mortgage recording company, MERS, calls for online mortgage database guidance to be posted for Kentuckians whose banks use the MERS System instead of traditional public land records.
“Our job as public officials is to help Kentucky families, and we are providing much-needed transparency and accountability to a private mortgage registry that too often operated behind closed doors.” Beshear said. “I applaud our county clerks for the hard work they do. The critical information we are providing clerks will help instruct the hundreds of thousands of Kentucky families who have their mortgages registered with MERS on how to navigate its database.”
The settlement Beshear announced in February resolves claims against MERSCORP Holdings Inc. and its wholly owned subsidiary Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems Inc., or MERS, over allegations the company named itself as the mortgagee in public land records, thereby hiding the identity of the big banks who were the actual owners of the mortgages, while also failing to monitor the conduct of those banks.
Beshear’s settlement with MERS provides Kentucky homeowners with some of the best protections in the country. The settlement puts in place penalties that will be levied against MERS if it violates its obligations to Kentucky homeowners.
The settlement resulted in Beshear returning $2.8 million to the state’s General Fund. Beshear recommended lawmakers use the $2.8 million to support affordable housing, legal aid foreclosure defense work and to help the budgets of local county clerks.