Imagine you have this idea. You'll build an electronic database designed to record rapidly changing data for assets that move between companies. You make contacts with the various companies and your system acts as the middleman. You are the central database, reducing the costs these companies have by trying to keep their own systems in sync. But what happens when your database becomes the legal record and it's not up to date?
That is what might have happened with the MERS system. It is supposed to record the mortgage titles, linking homeowners with their mortgage holder. Since mortgages are often sold many times during their lifetimes, MERS was supposed to reduce the costs and time involved with each sale. By having MERS maintain title, recording fees and time is reduced as everything is centralized. Theoretically, this is what we want centralized databases to do: make things more efficient and accurate.
But that's not always what happens. We make mistakes, we have coding bugs, and a single database could easily have many mistakes in it. In fact, this is why having a single database for a distributed system could be a bad idea. Multiple databases can allow you to compare data, and perhaps track down any discrepancies between systems.
This is one reason that a data warehouse can be a valuable addition to your company. By taking feeds from multiple systems, and standardizing the information, it's easier to use. However that ETL step can provide a valuable double check of your data, and a good feedback look can enable you to find data quality issues and correct them.
I don’t know if the MERS system has data quality issues, but if they are going to be a legal system of record, their data has to be accurate.
Steve Jones
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