Another county recorder has removed her office deposits from a MERS bank, in protest of MERS' alleged evasion of recording fees and detrimental effects of the use of MERS on the integrity of land titles.

Montgomery County, Pennsylvania Recorder of Deeds Nancy J. Becker has pulled funds from a MERS-member bank, Wells Fargo, in favor of a smaller local bank, Univest National Bank and Trust Company of Soudertown, Pennsylvania.  “They’re just a really good conservative bank," Becker told a local paper.

Becker says that if it were not for MERS, numerous assignments would have been filed on about 140,000 MERS mortgages that have been filed in the county since 2004.  Becker estimates that her office has lost $15 million in recording fees due to those MERS mortgages. 

MERS has claimed that it does not owe those fees.  "It is not the case that recording fees are somehow owed or outstanding. MERS pays recording fees when the mortgage is recorded. Fees are paid for a service performed, and if a document is eliminated because it is no longer necessary, no fee is due because there is nothing to record," MERS said in a February statement.
 

Becker joins John O'Brien, the Recorder of Deeds for the Southern District of Essex County Massachusetts, in pulling deposits from a MERS bank.

Montgomery is a densely populated county containing the northwestern suburbs of Philadelphia.  About 800,000 people reside in the county.