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And this is Obama's economic advisor??
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"WASHINGTON - The former Fannie Mae accountant who raised questions about the mortgage giant’s bookkeeping said Wednesday that he took his concerns directly to chief executive Franklin Raines in 2002 and asked him to investigate.
The disclosure by Roger Barnes, who left Fannie Mae last November, came as Raines and chief financial officer Timothy Howard defended the company’s accounting and told Congress that regulators’ allegations of earnings manipulation represent an interpretation of complex rules.
The regulators have said that information provided by Barnes was important to their investigation of the government-sponsored company’s accounting.
“I urged Mr. Raines and Mr. Howard to investigate the issues identified,” Barnes said in written testimony submitted for a hearing by the House Financial Services subcommittee that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, its smaller rival in the multitrillion-dollar home mortgage market.
“Neither Mr. Raines nor Mr. Howard, nor anyone from their staffs, investigated these concerns or took corrective action,” he said. “Thus, the practices I had identified continued, and I faced continuing reprisal for raising concerns about these issues.”
Barnes, who was a manager in the Controller’s Division, said that he anonymously sent the two executives a memo on Sept. 23, 2002, calling himself a Finance Division Manager. The information he provided was “easily traceable” to him because he was among only a handful of managers who had detailed data on the company’s process for accounting for expenses over time, said Barnes.
At Fannie Mae, he said, “The atmosphere and culture, particularly within the Controller’s Division, is one of intimidation, restraint of dissenting opinions and pressure to be part of the ’team,”’ giving Raines and Howard the numbers they sought to please the markets."
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