According to the complaint, Morningstar's rating process involved determining key cash flow and valuation amounts for commercial properties and associated loans backing each CMBS transaction, and their model then stressed those amounts to project expected loan losses in different economic environments. The complaint alleged that Morningstar's rating methodologies did describe how its model stressed net cash flow and capitalization rates, for example applying different stresses for different property types and applying different capitalization stresses at each rating category. However, the methodologies did not disclose that analysts were permitted to make "loan-specific" adjustments to the disclosed cash flow and capitalization rate stresses. The complaint alleges that while the adjustments were used both to increase and decrease property cash flow and valuation stresses, the adjustments were "overwhelmingly" used to decrease those stresses, resulting in lower than expected loan losses and materially higher ratings for many classes of the CMBS certificates.