Truthout's Ellen Brown takes a close look at the many pieces surrounding the latest disclosures of missing and/or forged mortgage documents, examines the reasons behind it - and explains why the problem won't just go away:

By most reports, it would appear that the voluntary suspension of foreclosures is underway to review simple, careless, procedural errors - errors which the conscientious banks are hastening to correct. Even Gretchen Morgenson in The New York Times characterizes the problem as "flawed paperwork."However, those errors go far deeper than mere sloppiness; they are concealing a massive fraud. They cannot be corrected with legitimate paperwork, and that was the reason the servicers had to hire "foreclosure mills" to fabricate the documents. These errors involve perjury and forgery - fabricating documents that never existed and swearing to the accuracy of facts not known.

Karl Denninger at MarketTicker is calling it "Foreclosuregate." Diana Ollick of CNBC calls it "the RoboSigning Scandal." On Monday, Ollick reported rumors that the government is planning a 90-day foreclosure moratorium to deal with the problem.

Three large mortgage issuers - JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and GMAC - have voluntarily suspended thousands of foreclosures, and a number of calls have been made for investigations.Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray announced on Wednesday that he is filing suit against Ally Financial and GMAC for civil penalties up to $25,000 per violation for fraud in hundreds of foreclosure suits.These problems cannot be swept under the rug as mere technicalities. They go to the heart of the securitization process itself. The snowball has just started to roll.

Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism has uncovered a price list from a company called DocX that specializes in "document recovery solutions."

DocX is the technology platform used by Lender Processing Services to manage a national network of foreclosure mills. The price list includes such things as "Create Missing Intervening Assignment," $35; "Cure Defective Assignment," $12.95; "Recreate Entire Collateral File," $95. Notes Smith:

[C]reating ... means fabricating documents out of whole cloth, and look at the extent of the offerings. The collateral file is ALL the documents the trustee (or the custodian as an agent of the trustee) needs to have pursuant to its obligations under the pooling and servicing agreement on behalf of the mortgage backed security holder. This means most importantly the original of the note (the borrower IOU), copies of the mortgage (the lien on the property), the securitization agreement, and title insurance.

How do you recreate the original note if you don't have it? And all for a flat fee, regardless of the particular facts or the supposed difficulty of digging them up.

All of the mortgages in question were "securitized" - turned into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) and sold off to investors. MBS are typically pooled through a type of "special purpose vehicle" called a Real Estate Mortgage Investment Conduit or "REMIC," which has strict requirements defined under the US Internal Revenue Code (the Tax Reform Act of 1986). The REMIC holds the mortgages in trust and issues securities representing an undivided interest in them.

Denninger explains that mortgages are pooled into REMIC Trusts as a tax avoidance measure, and that to qualify, the properties must be properly conveyed to the trustee of the REMIC in the year the MBS is set up, with all the paperwork necessary to show a complete chain of title. For some reason, however, that was not done; and there is no legitimate way to create those conveyances now, because the time limit allowed under the Tax Code has passed.

The question is, why weren't they done properly in the first place? Was it just haste and sloppiness as alleged? Or was there some reason that these mortgages could NOT be assigned when the MBS were formed?

Denninger argues that it would not have been difficult to do it right from the beginning. His theory is that documents were "lost" to avoid an audit, which would have revealed to investors that they had been sold a bill of goods - a package of toxic subprime loans very prone to default.