Fannie Mae, the District-based purchaser of home mortgages, plans to lay off several hundred workers by the end of the year in an effort to cut costs.
Earlier this month, Fannie Mae, a giant in the mortgage lending industry, said it reviewed expenditures to cut $200 million in costs in an effort to recover from an accounting scandal that cost the firm $400 million in federal fines.
According to reports, the company said it would look for ways to cut expenses, but that layoffs were not anticipated.
But in an internal memo The Examiner obtained, Fannie Mae Chief Executive Officer Daniel Mudd said the company — which has 6,500 employees — would cut jobs.
“Even as we continue to hire for critical positions in areas such as finance, risk, and internal audit, we will be looking to become yet more efficient,” he wrote in the March 19 letter to employees. “Thus, it is likely that we will end the year with several hundred fewer employees than we have today.”
In a statement, also dated March 19 but not posted on the Fannie Mae Web site, communications manager Brian Faith said the company will eliminate some full-time positions.
The statement did not specify what positions or when and where the layoffs would take place.
The federally chartered firm is trying to recover from an accounting scandal, in which it misstated more than $10 billion in earnings from 1998 to 2004, leading to the $400 million in fines from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
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