There is a kind of institutional dishonesty that operates not through a single act of corruption but through a sustained, compounding tolerance of it — a culture of looking away refined over years into something that functions exactly like complicity. The National Association of Mortgage Field Services (NAMFS) has spent more than a decade building that culture, and the record of what it has protected, whom it has shielded, and what it has refused to say constitutes one of the most thoroughly documented indictments of a trade association in the modern history. That, even before Amie Sparks blew the whistle with the A2Z Field Services bankruptcy and her laying of fraud accusations against Steve Horne I have reported upon. Foreclosurepedia has covered that record in real time, from the first Berghorst bankruptcy filings — the former NAMFS Secretary filed two bankruptcies while in the Industry — to the courtrooms of Missouri, and what emerges when the full arc is laid flat is not a series of isolated membership failures but a pattern with a structure — a structure that serves the association, serves its largest members, and leaves the field service technicians and inspectors who perform the actual labor to absorb every loss without recourse, without representation, and without so much as a public statement of concern from HUD Secretary Scott Turner or the organization that claims to speak for the profession, NAMFS. The pattern has a shape. That shape is deliberate.
If you are new to NAMFS or Eric Miller, this is a good primer on precisely what kind of organization you have joined. The fraud? Yeah, well that is run-of the mill. The heinous crimes? Oh yeah, here is what you have joined! Simply read on.
The story begins, for most people who followed this industry closely enough to catch it, with Heather Berghorst of Holland, Michigan. Berghorst was the Secretary of NAMFS, seated on its board in a position of explicit governance and reputational endorsement, while simultaneously running Berghorst Enterprises and Heritage Home Solutions out of Ottawa County. The mechanism of her fraud was not complicated. Altisource Portfolio Solutions paid Berghorst for completed work orders. Berghorst collected those reimbursements and did not pass payment to the contractors who had performed the underlying labor. The money cycled through a rotating constellation of corporate shells — Berghorst Enterprises, Heritage Home Solutions, Yorkshire Development LLC, each one registered at a residential address in Hamilton or Holland, Michigan — while the inspectors and field service technicians who had driven to properties, documented conditions, boarded windows, secured doors, and submitted reports went unpaid. Foreclosurepedia documented the shell company architecture as it was constructed, located each new entity as it was filed with the State of Michigan, and published the addresses that proved what Berghorst was operating was a kitchen-table fraud operation laundered through the credibility of a NAMFS board seat. The total exposure exceeded a million dollars, with minority women concentrated heavily among the hardest hit.
When the bankruptcy proceedings ran their course, a federal judge found that the transfer of collateral had been willful — specifically designed to injure Fifth Third Bank’s security interest — and ordered repayment. Even the US Small Business Administration got raped! That finding deserves to sit on the page without any softening around it: willful, not negligent, not the result of mismanagement or bad luck, willful. Fifth Third sued. Contractors sued. Foreclosurepedia ran the #OpBerghorst and #OpNAMFS campaign and held the top organic search result on Page One Google for Berghorst’s name for years, because the only enforcement mechanism that functioned in this situation was independent journalism.
What NAMFS did during this entire period is the more instructive part of the story, and the part that the industry has consistently declined to examine with the seriousness it warrants. Eric Miller, the Executive Director who would go on to consume over one hundred and ten percent of annual membership dues in salary and expenses according to IRS filings while the organization’s legally required IRS Form 990 filings lapsed into documented non-compliance, defended Berghorst publicly and declined to remove her from the board. NAMFS issued no statement on the contractor losses. It opened no ethics investigation. It took no action that would have cost the organization a single dues payment or a single conference sponsorship. When lawyers deployed to threaten Foreclosurepedia with RICO litigation on Berghorst’s behalf were dispatched — and they were dispatched both by Berghorst and NAMFS by Eric Miller — NAMFS remained silent on that too, neither endorsing the attempt to silence reporting nor distancing itself from an officer of the organization pursuing legal threats against a journalist covering her fraud.
There is also this, and it demands to be stated plainly: Heather Berghorst had filed a prior bankruptcy in 2002, more than a decade before she was seated as NAMFS Secretary. The question of how a now defunct IRS 501(c)(6) business league whose stated mission includes professional standards in the mortgage field services industry allowed a candidate with a documented prior bankruptcy to ascend to its board of directors. It has never been answered by NAMFS. It has never even been asked by NAMFS in any public forum. When the fraud became too publicly documented to ignore at the membership level, Altisource reinitiated business with Berghorst under the Heritage Home Solutions rebrand — the very assumed name created underneath Berghorst Enterprises LLC on March 13, 2013 — and NAMFS found no issue with that continuation either. And our investigation partially flowed through the former Altisource associate general counsel at the time. The organization, NAMFS, that could not vet its own secretary’s bankruptcy history before seating her was also, it turned out, an organization that could not be troubled by the fact that her primary client was rewarding her rebranded entity after the fraud had been documented in federal bankruptcy proceedings.
Berghorst was not an anomaly, and the industry record proves it without ambiguity. Buczek Enterprises, a NAMFS member and one of the founding fifty members in the association’s early formation, stole several million dollars from contractors. Dan Buczek’s operation ran the same basic mechanism at a scale that dwarfed the Berghorst exposure: collect work order revenue from the national client, withhold payment from the field service technicians and inspectors who performed the physical work, and rely on the NAMFS membership credential to keep the upstream contracts flowing while the downstream labor went unpaid. Hurst v Buczek was the first federal employee misclassification that paid a handsome settlement back in 2010. NAMFS took no public action. Jay Goscinski, owner of Michigan Realty Services and another dues-paying NAMFS member, followed with nearly half a million dollars in contractor fraud before his operation collapsed under the weight of what he had taken. And the Breaking Bad stealing of his Winnebago from a mechanic is well documented when Jay didn’t want to pay that bill, either!
The geographic concentration of these frauds around Michigan is worth noting; more important is the operational similarity across all three cases, because each one ran the identical extraction model, and each one ran it inside the NAMFS membership umbrella without that umbrella functioning as any form of deterrent, early warning, or corrective mechanism at any stage of the fraud. What NAMFS had constructed, whether through deliberate design or through the accumulated inertia of institutional self-interest, was a credential that conferred legitimacy on firms whose principals were running extraction operations against the labor force. The NAMFS seal was the mechanism that kept national clients sending work orders to member companies. It was never a quality guarantee in any enforceable sense. It was a door opener, and bad actors used it because no one at NAMFS was checking whether the door should have been opened.
I would be remiss if I did not mention the fraudulent billing for selling fake insurance by NAMFS member Vicki Boser who faced 20 years in prison and did somewhat less. Or the bounced checks from NAMFS Bronze Contribution member Carol Boyd who was knee deep in tax fraud investigations.
None of the foregoing, however, prepared the industry for Southeastern Asset Services, known in every coverage and enforcement context by its acronym, SEAS. SEAS was the apex event of the NAMFS fraud era — a company whose collapse exposed nearly five million dollars in financial fraud against contractors, inspectors, and field service technicians across a footprint of delinquent work orders that spanned multiple states and left hundreds of labor participants without payment for months of completed work. SEAS was a NAMFS member. SEAS was a conference sponsor, embedded in the association’s social and commercial infrastructure in exactly the way that made it credible to the national clients above it and trustworthy to the labor network it was systematically defrauding below it. Foreclosurepedia documented the SEAS collapse in real time, including the extraordinary detail — established through email chains English Bob as we called the face of the company was using funds to rehab his own house while screwing Labor out of monies owed. Foreclosurepedia obtained from multiple sources and published contemporaneously — that Altisource continued sending checks to SEAS until eighteen hours before the company closed its doors permanently. Multiple states opened investigations. The fraud had been documented through contractor email records, payment ledgers, and direct source contacts for months before SEAS finally shuttered, and Altisource had been informed of the nonpayment situation through documented communication that included a February 2015 email from a contractor explicitly instructing their contact to call Altisource’s Patricia McTaggart immediately about the SEAS situation. McTaggart claimed at that point to be unaware of the situation. The checks kept arriving at SEAS anyway. The pattern Berghorst had run, the pattern Buczek had run, the pattern Goscinski had run — SEAS ran it at a scale requiring a larger word than fraud, and NAMFS said nothing of substance before, during, or after.
The Birdsey Group arrived in Foreclosurepedia’s coverage in the period following the SEAS collapse, and what Foreclosurepedia documented was a company shaping up to be a direct reincarnation of the SEAS model with a more polished institutional face. The operational fingerprints were identical to what had come before: a corporate structure that insulated principals from individual liability, a workforce of field service technicians and inspectors accumulating unpaid receivables while the company continued accepting new orders from national clients, and Altisource as the largest provider of work. Michael Dougherty, who had served as Vice President and General Manager of real estate field services for Altisource Portfolio Solutions before crossing to Birdsey Group, brought with him the institutional knowledge of how the Altisource work order pipeline functioned and, critically, how long a company could string along its labor force before the mechanics of the fraud became impossible to conceal from the people at the bottom of it. His colleague Reid Schermer made the same transition. The fact that Altisource continued to be the largest source of work to the firms that successively defrauded the inspectors and field service technicians Altisource’s own work orders had mobilized — Berghorst, SEAS, Birdsey Group in documented sequence — is not a series of coincidences.
It is the structural consequence of an ecosystem in which the national client absorbs zero downside risk for the labor practices of the order mills it funds, the trade association governing those order mills has no enforcement mechanism it has ever been willing to use against a dues-paying member, and the labor workforce classified as independent contractors has no legal mechanism to compel payment beyond individual litigation that most cannot afford to pursue.
And then comes — and you cannot make this shit up — Mickey Snow and good ‘ol Somporn (no typo). The Snow and Somporn thread sits in a category by itself — not because the financial fraud model was different from what Berghorst, Buczek, Goscinski, and SEAS had run, but because the conduct that eventually surfaced around Mickey Dale Snow of Eden, North Carolina, and his associate Somporn Tongsua Hewitt went considerably beyond the theft of labor compensation. Snow ran Snow Enterprises as a fixture of the NAMFS member establishment, cultivating relationships across the association’s commercial network and operating under the the 8(a) Business Development Program contract structure in ways Foreclosurepedia documented in detail over the course of a multi-year investigative series. Tongsua Hewitt operated Tongsua Management out of Snow’s own Eden, North Carolina address — a fact visible in the original LLC filing — and Snow’s NAMFS-credentialed standing provided the institutional veneer that gave both operations continued access to HUD prime vendor relationships and the national client pipeline.
What NAMFS’s credentialing apparatus had enabled was not simply a bad actor in its membership but, as Foreclosurepedia documented in the eighteen-part series published under the designation Mickey Snow: Child Rapist Extraordinaire, a man who was simultaneously one of the industry’s most celebrated insiders and the subject of a Rockingham County grand jury indictment on six counts each of having sex with a child and patronizing a prostitute — charges arising from a teen prostitution ring operating out of Eden in which underage girls were sold to adult men. Snow fled the United States on September 14, 2015, before Eden police could arrest him, crisscrossed South Korea, Thailand, Amsterdam, and Panama in an effort documented by the FBI to avoid extradition, and was ultimately apprehended by the Royal Thai Police in Bangkok in November 2015. Sources speaking to Foreclosurepedia placed the total value of alleged bribes paid to HUD HMBI personnel to maintain Snow’s contract positioning at approximately eight hundred thousand dollars.
Eric Miller and the NAMFS board, who had for years treated Snow as a pillar of the industry and whose members had conducted business through his network with full awareness of his standing, produced no statement on his arrest, no examination of how his HUD contract access had been maintained, and no accounting for what the association’s credentialing of his operation had enabled.
The silence was not incidental. It was the same silence NAMFS had maintained through Berghorst, through SEAS, through every documented fraud that had passed through its membership rolls — the institutional silence of an organization that has made a considered judgment that speaking would cost more than staying quiet.
The cumulative dollar figure across Berghorst, Buczek, Goscinski, and SEAS alone — conservatively approaching ten million dollars in documented contractor losses across those four cases — represents a generation of unpaid labor extracted from a workforce of field service technicians and inspectors who operate under independent contractor classification, receive no employment benefits, carry their own vehicle and fuel costs, and possess no collective bargaining mechanism to negotiate the terms under which their labor is priced or their receivables are protected. The distinction between field service technicians, who perform the physical labor of property preservation — boarding, grass maintenance, debris removal, winterization, securing structures — and inspectors, who conduct occupancy assessments and condition documentation, matters here because both categories were victimized across these frauds, often by the same companies in the same fraud cycles, and because NAMFS has consistently treated labor as an undifferentiated abstraction it can invoke rhetorically without ever committing resources to protect.
An organization that has consumed over a hundred and twenty thousand dollars annually in executive director compensation — with Miller’s salary routinely exceeding total membership dues collected, an inversion of nonprofit purpose that would embarrass a competent board — while simultaneously refusing to file legally required IRS Form 990 returns for years running has made its priorities structurally visible. Those priorities do not include labor. They have never included labor.
The murder of Michael Dodge II on October 22, 2025, belongs in any honest accounting of what NAMFS’s institutional silence has cost, because it is the cost paid in the hardest currency there is. Dodge was a thirty-five-year-old field service technician, a husband and a father, sent to a foreclosed home on Mountain View Road in Fredericksburg, Virginia to secure the property and change the locks — a routine work order on a property that was supposed to be vacant. It was not vacant. Donald Thomas, sixty-four years old, was inside, armed, and when Dodge called his employer to report an aggressive occupant with a gun on him, the response from the company was not an immediate abort, not a protocol that pulled him back from the threshold of a situation that had already turned lethal in everything but outcome. He was found dead in the driveway. Thomas was arrested and charged with first-degree murder.
The International Association of Field Service Technicians (IAFST) established a memorial fund for Michael Dodge II’s family, because someone had to, and the organization that had spent two decades claiming to represent the professionalism and safety standards of this workforce — NAMFS — issued no statement on his death, no call for review of occupancy verification protocols, no acknowledgment that the field service technician who died doing exactly what the industry’s work order system sent him to do deserved so much as a public word from the trade association whose conference fees his labor helped underwrite. The silence NAMFS maintained after Michael Dodge II was murdered is the same silence it has maintained after every fraud, every conviction, every unpaid invoice, and every crisis this industry has produced on its watch. It is not the silence of an organization that failed to find the right words. It is the silence of an organization that made a calculated decision that speaking would cost more than staying quiet, and that the field service technician who paid with his life was not the constituency that calculation was designed to protect.
The liability that NAMFS has never once addressed publicly is not limited to the financial extraction documented across Berghorst, Buczek, Goscinski, SEAS, and the rest of the fraud ledger. It extends to the legal exposure the industry’s order mill structure systematically transfers onto the inspectors at the bottom of it, and the SingleSource trespass case documented by Foreclosurepedia is the clearest single illustration of how that transfer works in practice. An inspector received a criminal trespass citation while executing a work order routed through SingleSource on behalf of a major servicer — a work order that sent him to a property, directed him to make contact, and provided him no legal instrument establishing the servicer’s authority to access the premises.
When the citation came, SingleSource paid the $150 fine and reclassified the order as no contact. No defense. No representation. Nothing, as both SingleSource and others knew there was no legal justification to step foot on the property and demand photos of the hand knocking on the door!
That receipt is a corporate confession: it is cheaper for the order mill to absorb a $150 fine than to defend the legal authority of the work order it assigned. The inspector, however, did not walk away for $150. He walked away carrying a criminal trespass citation now embedded in the National Crime Information Center database — a federal record that follows him to every background check, every employment application, every traffic stop for the rest of his working life.
Local law enforcement warned him directly: a second citation means arrest and jail time. The order mill moved on to the next work order. NAMFS, whose stated mission includes professional standards and whose membership collected the revenue that work order generated, has never addressed the trespass liability structure, never published guidance on what legal authority an inspector can cite at the door of an occupied property, and has never acknowledged that the $150 fine its member paid constitutes an implicit admission that the inspector was sent somewhere the company had no defensible legal right to send him. The inspector carries the record. The company kept the margin. NAMFS kept the dues.
Which brings the full arc of this story to 2025 and 2026, and to the situation that is either the logical terminus of what NAMFS has always been or simply the most operationally brazen iteration of it the organization has yet produced. Chad Rulo is the current President of the National Association of Mortgage Field Services. He is simultaneously the Chief Executive Officer of First Rate Field Services. In September 2025, Rulo filed active litigation against Amie Sparks and A2Z Field Services, seeking millions of dollars in damages. That litigation is active in two jurisdictions simultaneously: the Eastern District of Missouri federal court, docketed at Case 4:2025cv01316, and the Missouri Circuit Court for St. Louis County at 25SL-CC08409.
The federal case had produced no publicly visible filings since February 2026 as of Foreclosurepedia’s most recent review, a timeline consistent with the discovery phase of complex commercial litigation. The litigation exists, it is active, and it has not been resolved. The man prosecuting it is simultaneously serving as the President of the trade association whose membership roster includes both First Rate Field Services — his company — and Black Dome Services, the company whose president, Amie Sparks, is the named defendant in his lawsuit.
NAMFS has issued no public statement on the dual-role conflict. Not one. The organization whose stated mission encompasses professional standards and industry accountability has not addressed the fact that its sitting president is in active federal and state court against a company whose personnel operate within the NAMFS membership structure. It has not addressed the hundreds of inspectors whose compensation from the A2Z and Black Dome networks went unpaid — inspectors who drove to foreclosed properties across multiple states, completed condition assessments, submitted occupancy reports, and fulfilled every contractual obligation of their work orders and were never made whole. It has not addressed the acquisition negotiations between Black Dome and Spectrum Solutions Acquisitions that would have resolved a portion of the outstanding labor obligations at forty cents on the dollar — and that forty-cent figure is itself the industry’s revealed market rate for what an inspector’s unpaid invoice is worth when the company holding the ledger is circling the drain and a buyer is in the room.
Foreclosurepedia documented that offer and its implications in March 2026. Additional Signal chats confirmed the matter. The subsequent reporting on the deal that never closed confirmed that as of May 2026, with the acquisition stalled and Black Dome continuing to present itself to the market as a going concern accepting new work orders, the inspectors remain unpaid. NAMFS has said nothing about any of it. The president of NAMFS, who is suing one of its members in active federal litigation, has not publicly addressed whether his dual role creates a conflict of interest. NAMFS itself, which has never publicly addressed any conflict of interest involving any officer in its history, has maintained its customary silence.
The thread running through all of it — from Berghorst’s 2002 bankruptcy that NAMFS never vetted, through the million-dollar fraud she ran as its seated Secretary, through Buczek’s several million, through Goscinski’s half-million, through SEAS’s five million, through the Birdsey Group’s assembly of the same apparatus with a more expensive corporate face, through the hundreds of inspectors now sitting unpaid inside the A2Z and Black Dome wreckage while the association’s own president prosecutes litigation against one of its member companies — is institutional permission. Permission extended through silence. Permission extended through the failure to vet. Permission extended through the refusal to open ethics investigations, to publish the financial disclosures the IRS requires of nonprofits, to create any mechanism by which a member company’s treatment of labor could result in consequences to that company’s NAMFS standing.
The trade association is not a regulator. NAMFS has never functioned as a regulator. It has functioned as a dues-collection apparatus that extends credentialing legitimacy to member companies in exchange for annual payments, and it has defended that arrangement with the consistency of an organization that understands, at the institutional level, that any genuine enforcement would begin by eliminating the members most likely to pay the largest checks. Berghorst was not an anomaly. She was proof of concept. Every fraud that followed her ran the same proof.
Foreclosurepedia has documented this for fifteen years under #OpNAMFS, and the documentation has never been successfully challenged in a court of law, a regulatory proceeding, or a public forum by anyone at NAMFS or among its membership.
The names in the ledger have changed — Berghorst to Buczek to Goscinski to SEAS to Birdsey Group to A2Z to Black Dome — but the organizational infrastructure enabling the extraction has not changed, because the organization that would have had to change it chose instead to cash the dues check, defend the fraudulent secretary, ignore the prior bankruptcy, shelter the officers, lapse on the IRS filings, and seat a president who is suing a fellow member in active federal litigation while the inspectors that member never paid remain unpaid today. The trade association did not fail. It performed exactly the function it was built to perform. The only people who ever believed it existed to protect labor were labor itself, and they have been paying for that belief ever since.
The federal government’s role in this cannot be understated and cannot be excused. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Finance Agency have had fifteen years of documented, publicly available, independently verified evidence that the NAMFS member ecosystem servicing their federally insured and GSE-backed asset portfolios has operated as a systematic fraud apparatus against the labor force performing the work those portfolios require. Every fraud documented in this article ran through work orders on federally connected assets. Mickey Snow operated inside the HUD Marketing and Management contract structure while allegedly bribing his way through it.
NVMS broadcast HUD master key codes to the public internet and neither HUD nor NAMFS acted after repeated notification. HUD Secretary Ben Carson tried and failed to correct that. Fannie Mae had sufficient contractual visibility into the National Field Network collapse to formally object to its disclosure statement over unpaid subcontractors — which means the GSEs have always had the mechanism to see contractor nonpayment, and have always chosen not to use it. HUD Handbook 4000.1 imposes property inspection and preservation requirements on servicers but has never been amended to establish legal authority protocols that would protect the inspector standing at the door of a property whose occupancy status the servicer cannot confirm — the precise gap that put Michael Dodge II in a fatal confrontation in Fredericksburg. Not one investigation. Not one enforcement action. Not one policy revision directed at the member ecosystem that services their assets, after a murdered field service technician, a convicted child predator with HUD contract access, a sitting trade association president in active federal litigation against a fellow member, and six hundred inspectors unpaid while the organization supposed to represent them says nothing. HUD, FHFA, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac made the same institutional choice NAMFS made.
They looked at the same record Foreclosurepedia has published for fifteen years and decided that looking away was less expensive than looking at it. The field service technicians and inspectors who absorbed every consequence of that decision were never consulted, never protected, and never compensated — because they were never the constituency any of these institutions were actually designed to serve.
