Mejappz
Elite Member
- Joined
- Dec 16, 2005
- Professional Status
- Certified Residential Appraiser
- State
- Florida
Nothing to see here folks. The corruption is all in your mind. Please move on. 
*** FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ***
IS OBSCURE FEDERAL REGULATOR RUNNING A CRIMINAL
ENTERPRISE?
VENTURA, Calif. (February 23, 2024) – It could be from a John Grisham novel.
Here’s the plotline:
An obscure government agency subsidizes a murky nonprofit foundation that
owns, sells and continually changes a set of copyrighted rules. The federal
agency then pressures state boards to enforce the foundation’s rules as binding
law on citizens of their states to the benefit of the private foundation. (The
foundation has ties to special interests, and the head of the federal agency is a
former foundation employee.) A class of citizens must continually purchase, at
monopoly pricing, always the most recent version of the fluid regulations at the
foundation’s online store to learn the law. The states levy a fee on the citizens
to recoup their administration costs. Part of the money goes back to the federal
agency – bypassing the congressional appropriations process. The agency
then shares the spoils with the foundation, and the cycle begins anew.
This is not fiction. It’s happening at a tiny government agency few have heard
of. The agency goes by the tortuous name the “Appraisal Subcommittee of the
Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council.”
Before a private organization can create binding law at will on citizens without
the involvement of any of the three branches of government, statutes and
constitutional principles must be violated. Here are a few:
• The federal agency has provided more than $1 million in grants some years to
the 13-employee foundation, a 501(c)(3) publisher known as the Appraisal
Foundation. Its long-tenured chief executive and a group of favored trustees
then travel the globe on junkets to places like Paris, London, Rome, Rio and
Singapore and host foreign delegations back in Washington. The foundation’s
IRS filings show that during a recent eight-year period, it received $6.5 million
in federal grants and parlayed that into $27.6 million in publishing revenue
thanks to the abuse.
• For nearly a decade, the federal agency diverted $2.7 million in grant money
earmarked for the states to the foundation, violating a portion of 12 U.S. Code §
3338, which required money to go to the states. Instead, the money went to
promote the foundation’s products via all-expense-paid junkets for state
workers to attend courses. Some of the diverted grant money was provided as
gifts of public funds to vendors, cronies and other private persons. While
receiving the diverted funds, the nonprofit amassed over $10 million in cash,
savings and publicly traded securities.
• The U.S. agency has pressured the states and several U.S. territories to
enforce 25 different versions of the private foundation’s copyrighted standards
while the former violates a key federal regulation, 1 CFR 51.1(f), and two
federal statutes, 12 U.S. Code § 3336 and 5 U.S. Code § 553. The neglect has
provided a monetary benefit for the tiny publisher for whom the federal
agency’s executive director was once an employee. The executive director and
deputy executive director – both federal employees – then join the publisher’s
trustees at weeklong retreats in winter playgrounds like Palm Beach, Florida;
Pasadena, California; and Scottsdale, Arizona.
• Representatives of the federal agency hold regular, closed-door meetings with
industry officials and other private persons. These meetings are in violation of a
federal open-meetings statute known as the Federal Advisory Committee Act.
By federal law, each of the private foundation’s paid panels must be registered
as so-called federal advisory committees if federal employees are to meet with
members on a regular basis. This is currently not the case and the Appraisal
Subcommittee of the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council is in
violation of a statute most federal officials known as FACA.
• The anti-commandeering doctrine, reaffirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in
New York v. United States and Printz v. United States, prohibits a federal
agency from commandeering state agencies, more specifically, from imposing
targeted, coercive duties upon state officials. That’s this tiny federal agency’s
stock-in-trade.
• The tiny federal agency’s coercion of state agencies has, in turn, led to
scofflaw activities at the state level. It has put Washington State, California,
Texas, West Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina and others in a situation in
which they must decide whether to comply with the federal agency’s demands
or with their respective state laws. Those state agencies now openly violate
their respective administrative procedure statutes.
# # #
Jeremy Bagott, a licensed appraiser and former newspaperman, sends up a
warning flare in his 2019 book “Dispatches from the Cosmic Cobra Breeding
Farm.” He takes the reader deep inside a tiny Washington, D.C., foundation
that has managed to have its copyrighted code of conduct enshrined in federal
and state law. All 50 states, even the U.S. territories of Guam and the Northern
Mariana Islands, now enforce it. The nonprofit, known as the Appraisal
Foundation, has parlayed the arrangement into a lucrative publishing cartel. In
his journey, the author uncovers a troubling trend deep in the plumbing of
government.
# # #
If you’d like to be on this mailing list but at a different email address, please go
to the sign-up page here.
-END-
*** FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ***
IS OBSCURE FEDERAL REGULATOR RUNNING A CRIMINAL
ENTERPRISE?
VENTURA, Calif. (February 23, 2024) – It could be from a John Grisham novel.
Here’s the plotline:
An obscure government agency subsidizes a murky nonprofit foundation that
owns, sells and continually changes a set of copyrighted rules. The federal
agency then pressures state boards to enforce the foundation’s rules as binding
law on citizens of their states to the benefit of the private foundation. (The
foundation has ties to special interests, and the head of the federal agency is a
former foundation employee.) A class of citizens must continually purchase, at
monopoly pricing, always the most recent version of the fluid regulations at the
foundation’s online store to learn the law. The states levy a fee on the citizens
to recoup their administration costs. Part of the money goes back to the federal
agency – bypassing the congressional appropriations process. The agency
then shares the spoils with the foundation, and the cycle begins anew.
This is not fiction. It’s happening at a tiny government agency few have heard
of. The agency goes by the tortuous name the “Appraisal Subcommittee of the
Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council.”
Before a private organization can create binding law at will on citizens without
the involvement of any of the three branches of government, statutes and
constitutional principles must be violated. Here are a few:
• The federal agency has provided more than $1 million in grants some years to
the 13-employee foundation, a 501(c)(3) publisher known as the Appraisal
Foundation. Its long-tenured chief executive and a group of favored trustees
then travel the globe on junkets to places like Paris, London, Rome, Rio and
Singapore and host foreign delegations back in Washington. The foundation’s
IRS filings show that during a recent eight-year period, it received $6.5 million
in federal grants and parlayed that into $27.6 million in publishing revenue
thanks to the abuse.
• For nearly a decade, the federal agency diverted $2.7 million in grant money
earmarked for the states to the foundation, violating a portion of 12 U.S. Code §
3338, which required money to go to the states. Instead, the money went to
promote the foundation’s products via all-expense-paid junkets for state
workers to attend courses. Some of the diverted grant money was provided as
gifts of public funds to vendors, cronies and other private persons. While
receiving the diverted funds, the nonprofit amassed over $10 million in cash,
savings and publicly traded securities.
• The U.S. agency has pressured the states and several U.S. territories to
enforce 25 different versions of the private foundation’s copyrighted standards
while the former violates a key federal regulation, 1 CFR 51.1(f), and two
federal statutes, 12 U.S. Code § 3336 and 5 U.S. Code § 553. The neglect has
provided a monetary benefit for the tiny publisher for whom the federal
agency’s executive director was once an employee. The executive director and
deputy executive director – both federal employees – then join the publisher’s
trustees at weeklong retreats in winter playgrounds like Palm Beach, Florida;
Pasadena, California; and Scottsdale, Arizona.
• Representatives of the federal agency hold regular, closed-door meetings with
industry officials and other private persons. These meetings are in violation of a
federal open-meetings statute known as the Federal Advisory Committee Act.
By federal law, each of the private foundation’s paid panels must be registered
as so-called federal advisory committees if federal employees are to meet with
members on a regular basis. This is currently not the case and the Appraisal
Subcommittee of the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council is in
violation of a statute most federal officials known as FACA.
• The anti-commandeering doctrine, reaffirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in
New York v. United States and Printz v. United States, prohibits a federal
agency from commandeering state agencies, more specifically, from imposing
targeted, coercive duties upon state officials. That’s this tiny federal agency’s
stock-in-trade.
• The tiny federal agency’s coercion of state agencies has, in turn, led to
scofflaw activities at the state level. It has put Washington State, California,
Texas, West Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina and others in a situation in
which they must decide whether to comply with the federal agency’s demands
or with their respective state laws. Those state agencies now openly violate
their respective administrative procedure statutes.
# # #
Jeremy Bagott, a licensed appraiser and former newspaperman, sends up a
warning flare in his 2019 book “Dispatches from the Cosmic Cobra Breeding
Farm.” He takes the reader deep inside a tiny Washington, D.C., foundation
that has managed to have its copyrighted code of conduct enshrined in federal
and state law. All 50 states, even the U.S. territories of Guam and the Northern
Mariana Islands, now enforce it. The nonprofit, known as the Appraisal
Foundation, has parlayed the arrangement into a lucrative publishing cartel. In
his journey, the author uncovers a troubling trend deep in the plumbing of
government.
# # #
If you’d like to be on this mailing list but at a different email address, please go
to the sign-up page here.
-END-