The President has signed the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act into law, giving the federal government more tools to crack down on corporate and mortgage fraud.

As Compliance Week reported, FERA bolsters the funding and tools available to law enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Justice Department, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, to pursue their enforcement priorities.

It also provides for the creation of a 10-member bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission to investigate the domestic and global causes of the crisis and report its findings to the president and Congress by Dec. 15, 2010.

The Commission is expected to focus on more than 20 areas, including the failure to protect consumers and individual investors; the role of fraud and abuse in the financial sector; tax treatment of financial products; credit rating agencies; lending practices; and corporate governance and executive compensation.

The law will also tighten the language of the False Claims Act; amend the criminal money laundering statutes to clarify that the proceeds of illegal activity include the gross receipts, and give the Justice Department more tools to fight fraud in the use of TARP and economic recovery funds.

Signing the bill yesterday, President Obama noted that the Treasury Department received 62,000 reports of mortgage fraud last year, while the number of FBI criminal mortgage fraud investigations has more than doubled over the past three years.