Back in 2012, Virginia received about $66 million from the National Mortgage Settlement — the money paid by mortgage lenders for falsifying records, forging signatures, and otherwise ignoring the law so they could foreclose more quickly.
Now Lender Processing Services, which worked with lenders, was also caught breaking the law. As Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan told the Chicago Sun-Times:
LPS and its subsidiaries became a sort of document factory, literally rubber stamping thousands of foreclosures with no regard for fairness and accuracy in the process.
Luckily, it too was caught and agreed to pay 46 states — including Virginia — $120 million.
Our share is supposed to go to housing, but it’s up to the General Assembly to decide whether to actually do that. Last time, most of the money (about 90 percent) went into the general fund.
