Ginnie Mae is in the process of hiring at least 40 new employees, which would increase the secondary market agency's staff by one-third.
The new open positions are being posted on the federal government's website periodically, according to executive vice president Mary Kinney.
"With 42 positions to fill – it's going to be several months to work our way through that pipeline," Kinney told ASR sister publication National Mortgage News.
At the end of 2011, the agency's staff of 84 managed a $1.24 trillion portfolio of securities backed by Federal Housing Administration (FHA), U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Rural Housing Service guaranteed mortgages.
The size of the MBS portfolio has doubled since 2008. Ginnie
At the request of Ginnie Mae president Ted Tozer, Congress authorized the agency to use $19.5 million of its fiscal year profits, which totaled $1.8 billion, to hire additional staff and upgrade the agency's information technology systems.
Now the agency is hiring account executives that work with Ginnie Mae-approved issuers and analysts that monitor their servicers to ensure they are adhering to FHA and VA servicing requirements.
Ginnie Mae is also beefing up the staffing of its risk office. The Office of Risk focuses on the issuer's financial stability, trends in the issuer's MBS portfolio as well as economic trends.
"They focus analytically on the elements of risk that underlie our program," Kinney said. They also keep in touch with account executives to get their input.
Under the Ginnie Mae program, issuers must continue to advance principal and interest payments on delinquent loans and buy the loans out of the pool once they become 120-days past due. This obligation can place a financial strain on issuers.
Kinney also said a "lot of their systems are old" and the agency wants to re-design its IT architecture. "We realize it is time to invest significant dollars in upgrading some of our systems," she said.
"We are going to be bringing on additional staff with specialized IT and operations skills to help" with that effort, the executive vice president said.
Ginnie Mae outsources its back office operations.
