There is a reason Foreclosurepedia keeps writing Alphonso Jackson’s name into stories about a mortgage field services industry he left office over in 2008. It is because he did not just fail to stop the fraud. He wrote the operating manual for it, and every HUD Secretary since — through two parties, four administrations, and a housing crisis he helped set the table for — has followed it to the letter. Scott Turner is only the latest name to inherit the pen and the Playbook.
This is not a history lesson. This is a living indictment, and it is long past time someone with subpoena power read it that way. Matter of fact, start with Fast Eddie San Roman and 24 Asset Management.
The Blueprint: Cronyism as Policy
Alphonso Jackson ran HUD from 2004 to 2008 and resigned only after the FBI opened a criminal investigation into how he ran it. The particulars are not ancient rumor. They are documented, reported, and never fully answered. A friend of Jackson’s was paid $392,000 by HUD as a construction manager in post-Katrina New Orleans, a contract that drew direct FBI scrutiny into the relationship between the two men. The Philadelphia Housing Authority sued him over alleged interference in a land deal that steered benefit toward people connected to him rather than the public HUD exists to serve.
And then there was the moment Jackson handed every investigative reporter who ever covers this agency a headline for free. In 2006, he told a room full of commercial real estate executives that he had personally revoked a HUD contract because the businessman who won it told Jackson he didn’t like President Bush. When HUD’s own Inspector General came asking questions, Jackson’s answer wasn’t a defense. It was a confession dressed as a correction: “I lied.” He said he made the whole story up for effect, in front of an audience, while sitting in the chair that controls billions of federal housing dollars. Whether the story was true or invented, the message to every contractor watching was identical — loyalty moves money at HUD, and the Secretary himself will say so out loud if the room is friendly enough.
That is the wink and the nod. Jackson didn’t invent cronyism at HUD — Samuel Pierce’s HUD in the 1980s wrote its own scandal-ridden chapter before him — but Jackson modernized it for the field services era that was about to be born. He proved, on the record, that a HUD Secretary could openly describe steering federal contracts on personal loyalty, resign under federal criminal investigation, and never face charges. Every procurement officer who came up through HUD’s ranks after 2008 learned that lesson whether they meant to or not: the wink and the nod is survivable. Say the quiet part loud enough, resign when the pressure builds, and the institution absorbs the loss for you.
The FHA Side: Fraud HUD’s Own Auditors Documented and Let Slide
While Foreclosurepedia’s beat is the field services side, that is only half of the same house. HUD’s Office of Inspector General has spent the years since Jackson’s exit auditing FHA-approved lenders and finding exactly the kind of program violations that should end business relationships with the federal government. HUD OIG referred DHI Mortgage Company for violating FHA underwriting requirements with prohibited restrictive addenda — twice, in two separate audits, because apparently once wasn’t instructive. HUD OIG referred Shea Mortgage for the same category of violation. The Department of Justice, working from a qui tam whistleblower filing, investigated Finance of America Mortgage over its acquisition of Gateway Funding Diversified Mortgage Services and alleged knowing participation in mortgage fraud that put FHA-insured loans at risk.
None of that is field services. All of it is the same institutional pattern: HUD’s own auditors find the fraud, HUD’s own enforcement apparatus refers it, and the entities involved keep operating in the FHA ecosystem while the paperwork slowly grinds through a process that outlasts the news cycle. Ask yourself how many FHA-approved lenders have been permanently barred from the program versus how many quietly kept originating loans while a referral sat on a desk. HUD does not publish that comparison, and Foreclosurepedia suspects that is not an accident.
The Field Services Side: The Same Institutional Shrug, Decade After Decade
Back on the ground, where Field Service Technicians and Inspectors actually do the labor HUD gets credit for, the pattern is identical and better documented because Foreclosurepedia has been the one documenting it.
In 2016, HUD OIG audited P.K. Management Group as the sole contractor performing property preservation for HUD-acquired properties across Region 5’s Illinois jurisdiction. That same audit cycle, OIG reviewed Innotion Enterprises over termite inspection passthrough costs billed to the government under its own M&M III field service manager contract. Ten years ago, HUD’s own investigators put irregularities like this in writing. Nothing structural changed. In fact, each were invited to tell HUD OIG how to write the report and then how to Deep Six the penalties. The M&M program kept running the same way, and the next awardee who wanted to game it simply had a decade-old audit’s worth of prior art to work from.
National Field Network filed bankruptcy on April 6, 2018, and buried nearly two million dollars owed to Labor in a proceeding that took eight years to close with zero distribution. Alan Jaffa settled for $300,000 against $1.85 million owed. Shari Nott, the hired CEO who ran the operation, was wanted by federal marshals before she died in a rollover crash. The Oglensky family spent years defending adversary proceedings over Bahamas property purchases and college tuition payments funded, allegedly, by money that should have gone to contractors. Professional fees in that bankruptcy topped $570,000. Not one dollar of that reached the people who actually did the work.
Berghorst held a NAMFS board seat as its Secretary while her companies stopped paying contractors. Buczek carried an active NAMFS membership while the misclassification litigation that would eventually cost this industry tens of millions of dollars in exposure was being filed against it in California federal court. SEAS ran the same playbook at scale. Birdsey and Altisource with Pat McTaggart ran it on the same rails. None of them lost their standing in the trade association that was supposedly representing the industry’s integrity. None of them faced a HUD contract suspension that stuck.
Steve Horne’s Wingspan Portfolio Advisors collapsed into Chapter 7 in 2015, leaving somewhere between one thousand and five thousand creditors unpaid. Horne didn’t disappear. He founded Black Dome Services, rebuilt servicer relationships on the wreckage, and in November 2025 acquired A2Z Field Services — installing Amie Sparks, A2Z’s own former CEO and its largest unsecured creditor, as his President. A2Z filed Chapter 11 in spring 2026, took two attempts to get the jurisdiction right, and Sparks swore under oath that Horne had loaded the company with more than three million dollars in merchant cash advance obligations that consumed the receivables owed to roughly 600 independent contractors performing federally reimbursed work. That is not an allegation Foreclosurepedia is speculating about. That is sworn testimony describing the same fraud architecture HUD has watched recur since before Jackson left the building.
And running underneath every one of those collapses is Eduardo San Roman. Assero Services, a company Lee Mertins and San Roman built together, collapsed owing Labor close to a million dollars and never filed bankruptcy — it just stopped, and San Roman resurfaced at the same Miami address as 24 Asset Management, a company that today holds ten HUD M&M FSM 3.12 award areas. Foreclosurepedia has published the bounced checks bearing San Roman’s own signature. We have published the pattern of money reported as paid on IRS Form 1099 filings that Labor never actually received — a federal tax fraud, not a payment dispute, committed against the same people HUD’s program exists to put to work. HUD’s Acting Deputy Director of Procurement, Craig Karnes, looked at all of it and refused to remove 24 Asset Management from its award, reasoning that San Roman may control Assero without personally directing its finances. That reasoning does not survive contact with a signature on a bounced check. Fast Eddie is still stealing from Labor today. Literally.
The Trade Association That Was Supposed to Watch the Henhouse
NAMFS was never built to represent Field Service Technicians and Inspectors at the bottom of this chain, and its own finances prove it. Executive Director Eric Miller drew annual raises of roughly ten thousand dollars, compounding year over year, until his compensation reached over $120,000 annually and, in at least one fiscal year Foreclosurepedia has documented from IRS filings, consumed over 100 percent of all member dues. NAMFS reported negative revenue in fiscal year 2015 while simultaneously paying $84,000 in compensation to questionable persons under IRS regulations. The association stopped filing legally required nonprofit tax returns for years at a stretch, making the true numbers harder to track — which was, functionally, the point.
Meanwhile, former NAMFS President Matt Zoldowski sold Property Preservation Wizard to Verisk, which also owns Pruvan — meaning the only national-scale work order software platform in this industry is run by a vendor with NAMFS leadership on its payroll. Nobody at the Department of Justice appears to have ever found that arrangement worth examining. Current NAMFS President Chad Rulo is simultaneously an active plaintiff in litigation against Black Dome and A2Z Field Services in both federal and state court, while presiding as the leader of the trade association both companies belong to. NAMFS has since attempted to rebrand as the National Association of Asset Management and Field Services, which changes the letterhead and nothing else. The organization that watched over the death of Michael Dodge II, a contractor murdered while working a foreclosure, has never treated Labor’s safety or Labor’s paychecks as a governance priority worth its own dues money.
What HUD’s Silence Actually Costs
Line up the FHA lending referrals and the field services non-payment cases side by side and the picture stops being subtle. Alphonso Jackson resigned under criminal investigation for exactly this behavior and faced no charges. HUD OIG documented FHA lender violations and DOJ pursued qui tam cases that moved at a bureaucratic crawl. HUD’s own 2016 audits flagged M&M III contractor irregularities and changed nothing about how the next contractor would be vetted. National Field Network buried Labor in an eight-year bankruptcy that paid Labor nothing. Assero became 24 Asset Management and kept its federal award under an active HUD Secretary who has said nothing about it. Every one of these is a separate case file. Together, they are a twenty-year record of an agency that treats federal fraud against its own workforce as background noise.
This is not incompetence. Incompetence doesn’t survive four administrations with this much consistency. This is a culture, established under Alphonso Jackson and never dismantled by a single one of his successors, in which the wink and the nod is simply how business gets done at HUD when the people getting cheated don’t have lobbyists.
What Needs to Happen Now
Foreclosurepedia has filed complaints. We have documented bounced checks, fraudulent 1099s, and sworn bankruptcy testimony. We have done what an independent trade press outlet with no subpoena power can do. It is not enough, and we are done pretending it is.
HUD’s Office of Program Enforcement should refer 24 Asset Management for Program Fraud Civil Remedies Act action now — the same statute HUD OIG has already used against FHA lenders for less documented conduct than a bounced check with Eduardo San Roman’s own signature on it.
Craig Karnes’ decision not to remove 24 Asset Management from its M&M FSM award deserves an Inspector General review of its own. If the reasoning genuinely was that San Roman controlled Assero without directing its finances, that reasoning needs to be tested under oath, not accepted on a memo.
Congress should reopen the oversight file on HUD procurement integrity that closed the moment Alphonso Jackson resigned. A resignation is not accountability. It is an exit. The House Financial Services Committee holds hearings on HUD’s budget every year — it is time one of them was about who HUD keeps paying, not just how much.
ProPublica, ICIJ, and any investigative outlet with real subpoena-adjacent resources should be looking at the National Field Network bankruptcy docket, the Black Dome / A2Z merchant cash advance testimony, and the 24 Asset Management HUD award history as a single connected story. Foreclosurepedia has done the field reporting. This story needs an outlet that can FOIA HUD’s internal procurement communications and depose the people who signed off on keeping known non-payers under federal contract.
The HUD OIG Hotline (800-347-3735) exists for exactly this pattern. Every FST and inspector who has been stiffed by a HUD M&M FSM awardee should file, in writing, with documentation and email it to [email protected] — A single complaint gets closed. A hundred complaints against the same contractor number becomes a pattern nobody can shrug off in a memo.
The Bottom Line
Alphonso Jackson taught this agency that the wink and the nod works. Every HUD Secretary since — through Steve Preston, through the Obama years, through the first Trump term, through Biden’s HUD, and now through Scott Turner’s — has been handed the same institutional muscle memory and none of them has broken it. The fraud didn’t start with 24 Asset Management and it will not end there. It started at the top, with a Secretary who said the quiet part in a ballroom full of contractors, and it has been quietly compounding ever since.
Foreclosurepedia will keep publishing the documentation. But documentation from a trade press outlet is not the same as a federal indictment, and Labor deserves both. Somebody in Washington needs to decide that twenty years is enough.
Foreclosurepedia exists because readers, workers, and advocates understand that protecting Labor in the mortgage field services industry requires independence, persistence, and resources. If you have documentation of non-payment, fraud, or retaliation connected to a HUD M&M FSM awardee, contact Foreclosurepedia. We publish what HUD would rather stayed buried.
