Appraisers are supposed to come up with a value free of any outside pressure. But more than three dozen appraisers nationwide interviewed by the AP said they often felt pushed by a real estate agent or mortgage broker to fraudulently inflate a property's value. They supplied the AP with documents from lenders asking them to "hit a number."

"The higher the loan amount, the more money brokers and lenders make in the deal," said Ray Haynes, an appraiser from Cherryville, N.C. "And they threaten you. They say, 'If you don't play ball with us, we'll go somewhere else.' And they do. I've seen my business shrink. They're all doing it. It's hard to stay honest."

Documents obtained by the AP also show that hundreds of appraisers complained to federal and state agencies about such fraudulent inflation of property values.

The appraisal system has broken down before. In 1989, Congress concluded that "faulty and fraudulent appraisals were an important contributor to the losses that the federal government suffered during the saving and loan crisis." And it passed the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act.

Under the law's reforms, a private group known as the Appraisal Foundation wrote the rules governing appraisers. The law also recommended that states begin licensing appraisers and disciplining those who break the rules.

A federal agency called the Appraisal Subcommittee, an independent federal agency that answers to Congress, would conduct field reviews and audits, and maintain a national registry of appraisers — including dossiers on those who break the rules.

But problems plagued the system from the start. It took years for some states to set up the independent review boards to supervise appraisers or hire personnel to investigate complaints. Even today, eight states still do not require appraisers to obtain a license or certification.

"We got to this point by a lack of enforcement. ... The public has the right to expect the appraisal boards are taking care of that problem," said Bob Ipock, an appraiser from Gastonia, N.C., who is a critic of the current system. "And they are not. They're looking the other way."

The Appraisal Subcommittee is supposed to help states remove from the system those appraisers who agree to "hit a number." But it has only four employees to conduct field reviews and audits of 50 states and four U.S. territories, and hasn't even had a permanent director since the agency's former chief retired at the end of last year.

Following Weinberg's subsequent departure in February as acting director, none of the agency's current employees — including interim director Vicki Ledbetter — returned more than a dozen messages left by the AP over a period of several months seeking comment.

When the agency does find a state failing to follow the law, the only tool available to force compliance is a death sentence known as "non-recognition" — a penalty that would ban all appraisers in that state from handling deals involving a federal agency.

"Do you know what that would have meant? The net effect is it would have effectively shut down mortgage lending in that state," former subcommittee director Ben Henson, who retired in December, told the AP. "To take that action would have been an unbelievable disruption to the economy. I wasn't going to do that."

When field reviews began in the 1990s, states were repeatedly warned they were failing to comply with the law — warnings that continue to this day. But without the ability to issue fines or impose a less destructive punishment, the Appraisal Subcommittee is powerless. It has never taken any action against a state for not obeying the law.

"Either you shut it off completely in a state, or you just send letters," said Gary Taylor, an appraiser from New York who sits on the Appraisal Foundation board that writes qualification guidelines. "The threat of the atomic bomb is the only thing."

And so, the violations stack up year after year, largely without consequence.