First, as Robert stated, RESPA is a consumer protection statute.  HUD has enough problems enforcing it with having it read to create new rights under RESPA for third-arty vendor claims that are nothing more than ordinary breaches of contract and/or collection cases.  On a different note, however, if a search was done which missed something that resulted in a claim, and was not paid for by the party affected, the search contractor has a strong defense.

Second, there seems to be a lot of nose-cutting in service of face-spiting on mark-ups.  In my area mark-ups are legal (8th Fed. Circuit).  Nonetheless, we don't merely mark-up, for example, our courier fees.  Instead, we charge a "title shipping service fee," which encompasses what we pay for overnight delivery, but also includes staff time to stuff the envelope, take it to a drop-off, following up on tracking deliveries where the addressee signed for the package but says s/he didn't get it*, shoveling out a box that was buried by a snow-plow, etc.  In short, we charge for work we actually do in shipping documents in addition to the outside-vendor cost.

The two areas which seem to be relevant to this list are independent search and signing contractors.  In my experience, the independents we use don't have any (or many) employees.  So if they're charging us above what they pay their own independents, are they submitting fraudulent invoices?  Furthermore, despite whatever E&O covergage our subs might have, chances are we have to cover any claims resulting from our reliance on them until we can collect from their insurer - that is, what their insurer's indemnity amounts to will be determined by how much my company owes our insured.

I certainly get annoyed when I am asked to reduce my company's fees when I see how much our mortgage broker "customer" (that is, the source of our work) is making on a transaction.  From a business perspective, however, it's literally not my business to question their fees, but rather to decide if what I'm getting paid on the transaction is worth my effort.

* Last Friday's amusing version - addressee asks us to deliver to her door, but says it wasn't delivered because she doesn't use her front door (where it was delivered).  Package had been sitting there for a week.