The whopping $298.5 million verdict in an FHA lawsuit against Americus Mortgage Corp. offers valuable lessons to mortgage shops and their executives to help them avoid potentially staggering liability under the False Claims Act and the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act, according to a legal analysis. Apart from the chief executive officer’s individual liability, the case is noteworthy because the court sided with the government in two post-trial rulings on proximate causation and statistical sampling in large-scale fraud cases. The case, U.S. v. Americus Mortgage, et al., involved two mortgage companies formerly known as Allied Mortgage and their chief executive officer, Jim Hodge. Filed in the Southern District of Texas in 2011, the lawsuit alleged fraud against FHA over a 10-year period. The Department of Justice sought damages under the FCA and FIRREA for losses stemming from ...