Documentary that doubles as a hagiography of a family of directors of a small Chinatown bank chain as they are brought up on mortgage fraud charges for wholesale fabrication of mortgage banking records sold on to Fannie Mae. They are proposed to be the victims of awful low level employee loan officers who fabricated and extorted the clients whose records they helped fabricate. What it actually shows is a family of shady bank directors who successfully firewalled themselves (take a page from Stevie Cohen!) from criminal guilt. Congratulations. A systemic problem that large wasn't found because they didn't want it found.
There's a few words about tax fraud in this film but the subject passes by quickly. Make no mistake though, that is the scam going on here. The default rates on these loans was so low because the applicants actually made much more money and/or had assets that they never paid taxes on. Possibly kept in the Abacus Bank security deposit vaults shown early in the film. The gift note is mentioned prominently in the film, a note where a relative or person connected to the borrower promises a money transfer and this promissory note is then added to the mortgage file. If the makers of this film were really interested in what actually was happening at Abacus, a fascinating thing to do would have been to try and find the authors of these notes. I suspect they wouldn't find many, and that most of these promissory notes were to cover for mortgage applicants pulling their own unreported money out of whatever bolthole they had it shoved into.
Was the prosecution and dog and pony show of dragging people in chains worth it? In hindsight, probably not, but that doesn't change the amount of shade going on at Abacus.
There's a few words about tax fraud in this film but the subject passes by quickly. Make no mistake though, that is the scam going on here. The default rates on these loans was so low because the applicants actually made much more money and/or had assets that they never paid taxes on. Possibly kept in the Abacus Bank security deposit vaults shown early in the film. The gift note is mentioned prominently in the film, a note where a relative or person connected to the borrower promises a money transfer and this promissory note is then added to the mortgage file. If the makers of this film were really interested in what actually was happening at Abacus, a fascinating thing to do would have been to try and find the authors of these notes. I suspect they wouldn't find many, and that most of these promissory notes were to cover for mortgage applicants pulling their own unreported money out of whatever bolthole they had it shoved into.
Was the prosecution and dog and pony show of dragging people in chains worth it? In hindsight, probably not, but that doesn't change the amount of shade going on at Abacus.