At the height of the foreclosure fiasco, MERS went from a little known computer database-driven company with roughly 50 employees to near-household name (if you had mortgage troubles anyway).

The dust has settled a bit, and with a federal consent decree in place, it looks like the firm will survive. That is, if the state attorneys general settlement and various judicial rulings do not deal a collective back-breaking blow somehow. Indeed, a recent Utah Court of Appeals decision "sided with lower courts that have dismissed suits brought by homeowners who face foreclosure, on the basis that this legal theory does not hold water and that MERS can foreclose. The ruling does not, however, deal with the other key legal issue in these foreclosure cases. Utah statutes state that the owner of a mortgage note cannot be separated from the deed of trust and the money lender is the beneficiary of the deed of trust, not MERS," according to this post.

To be sure, MERS has been working hard to change its ways. For example, it has moved rather aggressively to assign mortgages out of its name and to appropriate banks and servicers. One big issue here is whether MERS will ever start paying recording fees. That would certainly go a long way toward appeasing critics, but at the same time it would really cut into the value proposition to the entities that gave birth to MERS in the first place.

For more:
- here's an article

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