Shannon: That certainly eclipses any thing I have seen- so the consumer is paying $1190 for the title and we think charging $100 -150 is about right for a normal fee !!  The one HUD-1 I have from the MD company I was referring to only gets a total of $200 & $400 on those lines along with a number of misc charges , including the "hand recording " fee of $100 .

You can pretty much assume that the person that did the title did not receive anywhere near this amount of money for doing the search- the violation occurs when the fee for that title is increased when no other "core title work" is performed, and there is the violation.

You have found one of the glitches that would be hard to actually occur- think of a HUD-1 as a balance sheet showing all the accounting that is going to occur for this transaction- there will not ever be a check cut to "no name" or just left blank- unless there is something shady going on and they don't provide a signed HUD-1 to the customer so they can hide the embezzlement that is taking place-and if it is signed after the fact- it puts that person at risk of the penalties by providing false statements on the HUD-1.

I hope as a notary performing the settlement you are not indicating that anything other than the persons signing are who they are- it looks like this has a number of areas that need some double checking- if the title fee is that over priced to increase their fees, I wonder what else is not on the level.

Best of luck,Steve