AVOIDING RECORDING FEES.

AVOIDING RECORDING FEES. One of the ways that banks had sought to avoid dealing with one mortgage at a time was an attempt to avoid recording on the title records of each transfer of a mortgage. As described in this wikipedia article (which is one of those articles that seems to be fought over by both sides), the banks made use of the “Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems (MERS)” to avoid the requirement that “every time a financial instrument containing mortgages is sold, every mortgage (deed of trust) and note (obligation to pay the debt) presumably has to be re-recorded in US County courts and recordation fees have to be paid.” The theory was that the MERS could recognize the transfer on its private books, but that there was no need to change the legal ownership by MERS as recorded. This attempt to deal with mortgages as an aggregate rather than individually has now led to a number of attacks on the MERS, as described in the wikipedia article.