Washington, DC – James B. Lockhart, Acting Director of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), today released its Report of the Special Examination of Fannie Mae. The report details an arrogant and unethical corporate culture where Fannie Mae employees manipulated accounting and earnings to trigger bonuses for senior executives from 1998 to 2004. The report also prescribes corrective actions to ensure the safety and soundness of the company.
“The image of Fannie Mae as one of the lowest-risk and ‘best in class’ institutions was a facade,” said Lockhart. “Our examination found an environment where the ends justified the means. Senior management manipulated accounting; reaped maximum, undeserved bonuses; and prevented the rest of the world from knowing. They co-opted their internal auditors. They stonewalled OFHEO,” Lockhart said.
“Fannie Mae’s executives were precisely managing earnings to the one-hundredth of a penny to maximize their bonuses while neglecting investments in systems internal controls and risk management,” Lockhart said. “The combination of earnings manipulation, mismanagement and unconstrained growth resulted in an estimated $10.6 billion of losses, well over a billion dollars in expenses to fix the problems, and ill-gotten bonuses in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”
The OFHEO report is the product of more than two years of in-depth review involving nearly 8 million pages of documents. The report includes the following key findings:
Fannie Mae senior management promoted an image of the Enterprise as one of the lowest-risk financial institutions in the world and as “best in class” in terms of risk management, financial reporting, internal control, and corporate governance. The findings in this report show that image was false.
A large number of Fannie Mae’s accounting policies and practices did not comply with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). The Enterprise also had serious problems of internal control, financial reporting, and corporate governance. Those errors resulted in Fannie Mae overstating reported income and capital by a currently estimated $10.6 billion.
During the period covered by this report—1998 to mid-2004—Fannie Mae reported extremely smooth profit growth and hit announced targets for earnings per share precisely each quarter. Those achievements were illusions deliberately and systematically created by the Enterprise’s senior management with the aid of inappropriate accounting and improper earnings management.
By deliberately and intentionally manipulating accounting to hit earnings targets, senior management maximized the bonuses and other executive compensation they received, at the expense of shareholders. Earnings management made a significant contribution to the compensation of Fannie Mae Chairman and CEO Franklin Raines, which totaled over $90 million from 1998 through 2003. Of that total, over $52 million was directly tied to achieving earnings per share targets.
Fannie Mae’s Board of Directors contributed to those problems by failing to be sufficiently informed and to act independently of its chairman, Franklin Raines, and other senior executives, failing to exercise the requisite oversight over the Enterprise’s operations, and failing to discover or ensure the correction of a wide variety of unsafe and unsound practices, even after the Freddie Mac problems became apparent.
Senior management did not make investments in accounting systems, computer systems, other infrastructure, and staffing needed to support a sound internal control system, proper accounting, and GAAP-consistent financial reporting. Those failures came at a time when Fannie Mae faced many operational challenges related to its rapid growth and changing accounting and legal requirements.
Fannie Mae senior management sought to interfere with OFHEO’s special examination by directing the Enterprise’s lobbyists to use their ties to Congressional staff to improperly generate a Congressional request for the Inspector General of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to investigate OFHEO’s conduct of that examination and to insert into an appropriations bill language that would punish the agency by reducing its appropriations until the Director of OFHEO was replaced.
“As a government-sponsored enterprise, Fannie Mae has a unique position among American corporations and an extremely important mission,” said Lockhart. “It is also the second largest borrower in the world, only behind the U.S. government. As such, Fannie Mae has a special mandate and position of public trust. The previous management team violated that trust and did serious harm to Fannie Mae,” Lockhart said.
The report ends with recommendations from OFHEO’s staff to the Acting Director, which he has accepted. Some of the key recommendations include:
Fannie Mae must meet all of its commitments for remediation and do so with an emphasis on implementation – with dates certain – of plans already presented to OFHEO.
Fannie Mae must review OFHEO’s report to determine additional steps to take to improve its controls, accounting systems, risk management practices and systems, external relations program, data quality, and corporate culture. Emphasis must be placed on implementation of those plans.
Fannie Mae must strengthen its Board of Directors procedures to enhance Board oversight of Fannie Mae’s management.
Fannie Mae must undertake a review of individuals currently with the Enterprise that are mentioned in OFHEO’s report.
Due to Fannie Mae’s current operational and internal control deficiencies and other risks, the Enterprise’s growth should be limited.
OFHEO should continue to support legislation to provide the powers essential to meeting its mission of assuring safe and sound operations at the Enterprises.
OFHEO will announce a settlement with Fannie Mae before 10 a.m.
Click here for the full report on the Special Examination of Fannie Mae
Corinne Russell (202) 649-3032 / Stefanie Johnson (202) 649-3030