The St. Petersburg Times, which has a lengthy history of exposing the Church of Scientology to daylight, writes about a local company that, in 2009, drew unwelcome attention in a growing national controversy over home foreclosures.
Employees of Nationwide Title Clearing, a leading processor of mortgage-related documents for banks, loan servicers and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., were under fire for signing paperwork as “vice president” of various banks although they actually worked for NTC.
The assembly-line process in which workers scrawled their names or initials on hundreds of documents at a time — typically without reading them — helped prompt the term “robo-signing.” Critics said robo-signing raised questions about the accuracy of documents and the legality of thousands of foreclosure cases.
What few people knew was that the Palm Harbor company had extensive ties to the Church of Scientology. And that NTC’s owners, who have donated heavily to church projects, ran the company on management principles of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. […]
The use of Hubbard’s technology on Nationwide’s busy campus — which can image up to 500,000 pages of mortgage documents a day — has sparked complaints that the company foists Scientology principles on workers and creates a high-pressure environment.
The Scientology cult makes countless claims about its founder, but “>L. Ron Hubbard was — among other things — a dishonest man.
Many also consider him to have been a madman.