IN PRAISE OF HONEST HEROES - IN THIS CASE - SHERO - SHERRY HUNT - FINANCIAL WHISTLE-BLOWER

[N'Zinga Shani]

How many of us KNOW the story of my whistle-blower hero Ms. Sherry Hunt?  She saved us, the US tax-payer, a lot of money by blowing the whistle about the dishonest financial practices that were going on at CitiGroup.  She is a woman of conscience, honesty and principle.  She is a woman who worked her way up from the bottom with a high school diploma; she became VP at CitiGroup.  Read about her at Bloomberg, Hunttington Post and elsewhere.  The complaint contended that senior bank personnel applied "brute force" to quality control managers to effectively sweep "defects" under the rug. 

Hunt said such defects, mostly the fault of borrowers, included mismatched signatures on loan documents, white-out on income documentation, and mistakes on employment statuses. She said there were also errors on whether borrowers planned to live in homes they were buying as required for FHA loans.

But Citigroup had tied some salaries to the infrequency with which such defects cropped up, according to the complaint.

The government accused CitiMortgage of misleading it into insuring thousands of risky home loans that it knew or should have known did not qualify for insurance from the Federal Housing Agency, costing taxpayers nearly $200 million in claims.

CitiMortgage had certified for FHA insurance nearly 30,000 home loans valued at more than $4.8 billion since 2004, but more than 30 percent -- or 9,636 loans -- had gone into default, the Justice Department said. The default rate topped 47 percent for such loans made in 2006 and 2007, it added.

The government also said CitiMortgage failed to report many underwriting flaws and other problems as required to the FHA, part of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. This even extended to mortgages where borrowers were so stressed that they could not make their first payment.

Yet, this same company got billions of dollars of hard-working tax-payers money while they turned around and wanted to pay the CEO of CitiGroup - Mr.  Pandit - $15Million!!!!  This is after the company lost billions on his watch!

This was more than four years after the nation's housing downturn began, and nearly three years after a global financial crisis that resulted in Citigroup losing $27.7 billion in 2008 and accepting $45 billion of taxpayer bailouts.

Thank you Ms. Hunt. http://ning.it/MbrEGb America and the world NEED more courageous people like you.  It is not easy to be courageous especially in business in America, and especially when you are working for someone else.  It is not easy to be principled because the sharks come after you; however, your children and grandchildren will reap the benefits of your courage and your integrity.  THANK YOU KINDLY.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/16/sherry-hunt-citigroup-whis...