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ALL IN 

time to review more than , SARs filed with FinCEN. In response to inquiries
from the FCIC, the FBI said that to compensate for a lack of manpower, it had devel-
oped “new and innovative methods to detect and combat mortgage fraud,” such as a
computer application, created in , to detect property flipping. 
Robert Mueller, the FBI’s director since , said mortgage fraud needed to be
considered “in context of other priorities,” such as terrorism. He told the Commis-
sion that he hired additional resources to fight fraud, but that “we didn’t get what we
had requested” during the budget process. He also said that the FBI allocated addi-
tional resources to reflect the growth in mortgage fraud, but acknowledged that those
resources may have been insufficient. “I am not going to tell you that that is adequate
for what is out there,” he said. In the wake of the crisis, the FBI is continuing to inves-
tigate fraud, and Mueller suggested that some prosecutions may be still to come. 
Alberto Gonzales, the nation’s attorney general from February  to Septem-
ber , told the Commission that while he might have done more on mortgage
fraud, in hindsight he believed that other issues were more pressing: “I don’t think
anyone can credibly argue that [mortgage fraud] is more important than the war on
terror. Mortgage fraud doesn’t involve taking loss of life so it doesn’t rank above the
priority of protecting neighborhoods from dangerous gangs or predators attacking
our children.” 
In , the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, the regulator of the
GSEs, released a report showing a “significant rise in the incidence of fraud in mort-
gage lending in  and the first half of .” OFHEO stated it had been working
closely with law enforcement and was an active member of the Department of Justice

Mortgage Fraud Working Group. “The concern about mortgage fraud and fraud in
general was an issue,” Richard Spillenkothen, head of banking supervision and regu-
lation at the Fed from  to , told the FCIC. “And we understood there was an
increasing incidence of [mortgage fraud].” 
Michael B. Mukasey, who served as U.S. attorney general from November 
to the end of , told the Commission that he recalled “receiving reports of mort-
gage failures and of there being fraudulent activity in connection with flipping
houses, overvaluation, and the like. . . . I have a dim recollection of outside people
commenting that additional resources should be devoted, and there being specula-
tion about whether resources that were being diverted to national security investiga-
tions, and in particular the terrorism investigations were somehow impeding fraud
investigations, which I thought was a bogus issue.” He said that the department had
other pressing priorities, such as terrorism, gang violence, and southwestern border
issues. 
In letters to the FCIC, the Department of Justice outlined actions it undertook
along with the FBI to combat mortgage fraud. For example, in , the FBI
launched Operation Continued Action, targeting a variety of financial crimes, in-
cluding mortgage fraud. In that same year, the agency started to publish an annual
mortgage fraud report. The following year, the FBI and other federal agencies an-
nounced a joint effort combating mortgage fraud. From July to October , this
program, Operation Quick Flip, produced  indictments,  arrests, and 