Wikileaks releases the detailed Bank of America information about how they track their mortgages through Balboa, a company they acquired during the acquisition of Countrywide and how the 50 state Attorneys Generals aren’t digging deep enough. I wrote about something similar a year ago but this goes into much deeper detail and is worth the read. It was given to Wikileaks by a BofA insider at Balboa. Hats off to the crew at Wikileaks!
How Balboa Hid Documents for IndyMac and Aurora
Written by ExBofAEmployee1, Wikileaks/BankofAmericaSuck
Attorneys and Attorney Generals nationwide have been working diligently against the banks in order to keep their clients in their homes. You must keep in mind that there are several levels of indiscriminate behavior going on, keeping these efforts at bay. For now, however, I will give you a general overview of how some of the tracking systems interact and how the reporting works, so that those with the power to subpoena documents for their clients know where to find the correct documentation to support their individual cases, because as Abigail Fields points out, “It would certainly be provable/disprovable by subpoenaing documents.”
In order to do that, however, an attorney would need to know where to look. If you were to only subpoena generic loan information, you will only be provided with the System of Record (SOR) data, which previous posts have clearly proved do not show the full picture as there are several common ways of removing information from the system of record both individually and en masse. As the email trail clearly shows, there is always an audit trail in the back end if you know what to ask for.
Some of the more common scenarios are:
They foreclosed on my property without proper documentation
This is a difficult one to prove, but it can be done with proper timing. As mentioned in previous posts, there are multiple departments under the document tracking umbrella, but as a prosecuting attorney against Bank of America, the easiest place to start looking is in the Balboa mail room.
Mailed documentation is important, because if you time it right, this is going to be your first point of reference when locating your “lost” deed of trust, promissory note, mortgage, etc.
The first documentation you, as an attorney, will want to subpoena is the servicing contract between the insurance tracker (Balboa, Assurant, etc) and the loan servicer (GMAC, Aurora Loan Services, OneWest, GMAC, Wells Fargo, BAC, etc). These can be obtained by an Operations Account Manager for that specific account (the department is managed by Jeremy Dahl, who once again reports to Rhonda Meyers). For each loan servicer, Balboa maintains at least 1 OAM who works at the mortgage lender’s office and 1 OAM who works at a Balboa office in order to maintain constant communication. In addition, every week, these OAM’s hold 1 internal call amongst department managers to discuss outstanding issues and 1 external call which includes management from the loan servicer. After each call, documentation and meeting minutes are distributed to all members of Balboa management so that they are all made fully aware of what was discussed and the progress of any dealings. These meeting minutes are then stored in yet another share drive.
Each contract contains quite a bit of information, but you want to look specifically for the information regarding the Service Level Agreement (SLA), Return to Lender (RTL), and Unable to Locate (UTL) documents. What you are looking for specifically is: a) How long the insurance tracker is required to keep a non-insurance related document, and b) How the insurance tracker is required to process a non-insurance related document.
Why is this important?
One loophole often exploited by the mortgage servicer to “lose” documentation is hidden in this system. There are 2 ways to prove this:
1-Mass Scale
When IndyMac and Aurora were taken over by the Feds/filed bankrupcty, what they did to exploit this loophole was simply box up all of the files they didn’t want anybody to see and sent them to Balboa. Balboa took care of them, because: a) The document remained in possession of the insurance tracker for 90 days according to the SLA cited in the contract, and b) Any documents that had the lienholder’s (or an acceptable subsidiary’s) name on it was returned to them after the 90 day period according to the RTL guidelines in the contract, while any documentation where the lienholder information was missing (scratched out, torn off, etc) was shredded per the UTL guidelines in the contract.
In order to prove this scenario, you will also need to subpoena and review (in addition to the lender contract) the full range of volume tracking documents for the date ranges the Feds would’ve been checking records (these are stored on shared tracking drives located in Simi Valley, CA, Plano, TX, and Chandler, AZ), as well as a few weeks before and after. The volumes are recorded at each step of the mailroom process via MS Excel spreadsheets and MS Access databases (review Microsoft’s EULA for information on how to obtain this information). The volumes are tracked throughout several internal share drives, SQL databases, Sharepoint sites, and even on paper documents stored in filing cabinets by Rhonda Meyers and several other AVP’s throughout Balboa. If you were to subpoena and review these specific documents (whether obtained through BAC, Balboa, or Microsoft) for the date ranges surrounding any date federal regulators were physically auditing Aurora Loan Services and IndyMac Bank, you will notice the following irregularity:
On a high volume tracking level, you will see an influx of physical documents received by the Balboa mailroom within 3-5 business days of any timeframe in which the Feds were investigating actual documents at Aurora & IndyMac. You will also notice that the influx of incoming physical documents during your target date range inconsistently affects the relative amount of RTL & UTL documents when compared to the ratios outside the target range or when compared to EDI (Electronic Document Images) or Faxed documents, as all of these incoming document sources are tracked separately for purposes of the contractual SLA.
If you wanted to further prove the point, you can also subpoena the signed delivery records kept by both FedEx/DHL/US Postal Service and the Balboa mailroom (again, run by Rhonda Meyers and tracked via MS Excel spreadsheet in various share drives) in order to see where these large volumes came from. You can find the information in the loan servicers’ expense reports as well, because large boxes haphazardly filled with documents are surprisingly heavy and cost quite a bit to ship. Accounting records for Aurora, IndyMac, and Balboa will show this scenario happened and it is indeed traceable.
