Less than a month after releasing a tell-all report, home mortgage giant Fannie Mae said it has found additional accounting problems that will be added onto what is likely to be an $11 billion profit restatement.
In another embarrassing disclosure, company president and chief executive Daniel Mudd said Fannie Mae found errors related to investment securities, loans and mortgage-backed securities trusts. There was no dollar estimation on how the mistakes could affect the expected restatement of earnings from January 2001 through the second quarter of 2004.
The only good news executives had spun out of the excruciatingly detailed Feb. 23 report, written by former Sen. Warren Rudman, was that at least no new accounting errors had been unearthed.
In its latest filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Fannie Mae said it won't be able to file its 2005 financial report on time and that it expects to file its 2004 results in the second half of this year.
Last week, officials at Freddie Mac announced it would delay filing its 2005 financials two months, until May, needing the extra time to find a better method for estimating fair values of guarantee assets and obligations.Problems at the two government-chartered institutions, which control the bulk of the American home-mortgage market, have led to a move on Capitol Hill to tighten regulation of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and a scaling back of Fannie Mae's controversial investment portfolio.
