Mr. Edmund Honohan:

We do not know. The United States has had ten or 12 years dealing with the chain of title. The title gets chopped up into little pieces and is redistributed and resold. There is a book on it called "Change of Title". What this has resulted in, funnily enough, is the US seeming to be on the ball. There is an article in Duke Law Journalby a Georgetown University professor who states registration also benefits by the preservation of jurisdictional integrity and the creation of adjudicative efficiently. He states foreclosure is a severe remedy that involves the coercive power of the state to deprive a resident of his or her home and that a property interest receives particular solicitude in the law. He states this is precisely the sort of circumstance where there is a societal interest in ensuring the coercive machinery of the state is used appropriately, which necessitates adopting a more reliable source for verifying property rights. The result of what this professor describes is a list of prosecutions in the US of banks for having forged documents, robo-signatures and manufacturing the paperwork they have lost. They have been found out because, for some strange reason, in the US, the legal system works better in the sense of providing equality of arms. There is a list of cases from all of the states back to 2013. I will give an example.

In Vermont, U.S. Bank National Associationv. Kimball of 2011 upheld a denial of standing to foreclose because the bank could not demonstrate that it was the holder of the note at the time the foreclosure action was initiated. Actually, there was a decision in the High Court last week or the week before last where the bank had effectively come in and asked the judge “What do you mean we have to have the mortgage deed to produce to the court?” They did not have the mortgage deed and they did not know where it was. This was at the High Court. Why should it get to the High Court? Why did the Circuit Court not spot this? This was unregistered land. The judge said no, the bank was ignoring undergraduate law and that of course it had to have the mortgage deed. That is where we go from here.

To answer the Deputy’s question, the law will allow the owner to proceed as owner even in the absence of the paperwork. If the receiver has signed off on it, then it is a sale by receiver and if it is just paid off to the receiver, he will just withdraw his entry on the register and then you just carry on as before.