Former Fannie Mae accountant testifies
WASHINGTON (AP) – The former Fannie Mae accountant who raised questions about the mortgage giant’s bookkeeping said Wednesday that he took his concerns directly to chief executive Franklin Raines in 2002 and asked him to investigate. The disclosure by Roger Barnes, who left Fannie Mae in October 2003, came as Raines and chief financial officer Timothy Howard defended the company’s accounting and told Congress that regulators’ allegations of earnings manipulation represent an interpretation of complex rules.
At a House subcommittee hearing, Raines and Howard testified under oath in their first public appearance since news of the allegations and a Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry into government-sponsored Fannie Mae surfaced on Sept. 22. Lawmakers questioned them closely about an instance in 1998 in which accounting rules were said to have been deliberately violated so that top executives could collect full bonuses.
“This is a very serious allegation and I deny that it occurred,” Raines testified.
The bonuses were tied to an earnings-per-share target of $3.23 for Fannie Mae stock that year – and company profits came within pennies of that goal. Shares of Fannie Mae, which finances one of every five home loans in America, have lost some $14 billion in value since the allegations of accounting improprieties came to light. They rose $1.45 to close at $67.45 Wednesday on the New York Stock Exchange. The shares have fallen about $10 in the past month.
The regulators in the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight have said that information provided by Barnes, who was a manager in the Controller’s Division, was important to their investigation of the company’s accounting.
“I urged Mr. Raines and Mr. Howard to investigate the issues identified,” Barnes said in written testimony submitted for a hearing by the House Financial Services subcommittee that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, its smaller rival in the multitrillion-dollar home mortgage market. Barnes did not appear before the panel, but his written testimony was distributed to reporters.
“Neither Mr. Raines nor Mr. Howard, nor anyone from their staffs, investigated these concerns or took corrective action,” he said. “Thus, the practices I had identified continued, and I faced continuing reprisal for raising concerns about these issues.”
Barnes said that he anonymously sent the two executives a memo on Sept. 23, 2002, calling himself a Finance Division Manager. The information he provided was “easily traceable” to him because he was among only a handful of managers who had detailed data on the company’s process for accounting for expenses over time, said Barnes.
At Fannie Mae, he said, “The atmosphere and culture, particularly within the Controller’s Division, is one of intimidation, restraint of dissenting opinions and pressure to be part of the ‘team,”‘ giving Raines and Howard the numbers they sought to please the markets.
Raines insisted that the regulators’ findings, while serious, were arguable interpretations of complex accounting rules.
“These accounting standards are highly complex and require determinations over which experts often disagree,” he said. Raines noted that Fannie Mae’s outside auditor, KPMG, had endorsed the company’s application of accounting rules.
OFHEO Director Armando Falcon, testifying before the Fannie Mae executives, asserted that Fannie Mae improperly put off booking income to a future reporting period “to create a ‘cookie jar’ reserve that it could dip into whenever it best served the interests of senior management.” Those interests included smoothing out volatility in earnings from quarter to quarter and meeting earnings-per-share targets linked to bonuses for executives, Falcon said.
Raines and Howard have been put on the defensive by the OFHEO regulators’ report, which criticized Fannie Mae’s “culture and environment” for making “these problems possible.”
The Washington-based company, which is the second-largest financial institution in the United States, is also facing a criminal investigation by the Justice Department.
OFHEO has singled out Howard for blame in the scandal, saying in a report of the regulators’ ongoing investigation that he failed to provide adequate oversight.
Howard testified: “All of my judgments regarding accounting issues were made in openness and good faith, with the goal of providing investors with the most meaningful and understandable information possible.”
No specific finger has been pointed at Raines, a prominent Washington and business figure who was a White House budget director under President Clinton. Regulators have raised the possibility of a management overhaul, however.
As CEO, Raines certified in writing the accuracy of Fannie Mae’s financial results, so he would have violated a law – enacted in response to the 2002 corporate scandals – had he been aware of the accounting irregularities.
In mid-2003, after the accounting scandal erupted at Freddie Mac, Raines said his company didn’t “have any of the same issues” and hadn’t “undertaken any transactions to distort our true financial condition.”
Freddie Mac restated some $4.5 billion in earnings last year, ousted top executives and was fined a record $125 million in a settlement with regulators.
The result of the inquiries by Congress and the government could eventually ripple out to millions of Americans if they have to pay higher rates for new home mortgages or for refinancing, some analysts say. Those could be among the consequences if Fannie Mae is required to scale back its purchases of mortgages and forced to pay higher rates on its nearly $1 trillion in debt held by investors in the United States and worldwide.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while not directly guaranteed by the government, have special privileges including the ability to borrow directly from the U.S. Treasury. In return, they are charged with enabling more low-income and minority people to buy homes.
The implicit links with the government allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to typically borrow money at lower rates than the competition. Those funds are then used to purchase and guarantee billions of dollars of mortgages from banks, many of which are then packaged into securities that are resold on Wall Street.
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On the Net:
Fannie Mae: http://www.fanniemae.com
Freddie Mac: http://www.freddiemac.com
Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight: http://www.ofheo.gov
Securities and Exchange Commission: http://www.sec.gov