Bank Excuses on Foreclosure Growing Stale

November 15, 2011 By Steve Dibert 3 Comments

Bank Excuses on Foreclosure Growing Stale

“If you don’t air out the policies that led to the implosion of the economy, it will happen again. There’s not one sentence in the proposed agreement, not one period or comma about the stuff that blew up the economy. We can’t let the banks rewrite history.” -NY Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman

Michael Powell, NY Times

The Bank of America lawyer laid down a patented rhetorical move heard in courts across America. Your Honor, this Orange County, N.Y., homeowner — a New York City police officer — didn’t make enough money to qualify for a mortgage modification. He didn’t send us the right documents.

He didn’t, he didn’t, he didn’t, and so we should be allowed to foreclose.

Justice Catherine M. Bartlett of New York State Supreme Court cut off the lawyer. You, she said, are telling me lies.

“Bank of America got a bailout, and this is an outrage, how this man has been treated,” she said. “Hard-working, middle-class Americans are trying to make it, trying to refinance with your bank.”

Either bank officials show up in person, the justice said, or I’m going to order them “here in handcuffs.”

Rage has acquired a cleansing power. Patience as a virtue is a hard sell at the burnt end of a four-year economic collapse. Zuccotti Park shakes, rattles and rolls; television yakkers chat about inequality; and the federal judge Jed Rakoff all but heckled the Securities and Exchange Commission last week for going easy on Citigroup misbehavior.

Then there is Eric T. Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general, caught in Month 5 of a face-off with the White House. President Obama dearly wants to seal a deal in which the nation’s largest banks toss over a few bales of cash — $20 billion to help with foreclosure relief — and the state attorneys general agree not to pursue sprawling and explosive legal cases against the banks.

Mr. Schneiderman and Attorney General Beau Biden of Delaware, joined by a few others, say no. Banks, they say, should disgorge more documents, testify more precisely and prove more completely that they own millions of mortgage notes. These rebel attorneys general want the banks to hand over more than $200 billion, which would enable the government to write down tens of millions of mortgages.

But in the end, their argument is elemental: Wouldn’t the nation benefit from knowing the truth about the behavior of banks and bankers?

“If you don’t air out the policies that led to the implosion of the economy, it will happen again,” says Mr. Schneiderman. “There’s not one sentence in the proposed agreement, not one period or comma about the stuff that blew up the economy. We can’t let the banks rewrite history.”

Arizona Sues Bank Of America, Alleges Loan Modification Fraud

December 17, 2010 By Steve Dibert 2 Comments

Bob Christie, Huffington Post

Attorneys general in Arizona and Nevada filed civil lawsuits Friday against Bank of America Corp., alleging that the lender is misleading and deceiving homeowners who have tried to modify mortgages in two of the nation’s most foreclosure-damaged states.

Bank of America violated Arizona’s consumer fraud law by misleading consumers who tried to reduce their monthly payments to keep their homes, state Attorney General Terry Goddard said. The bank also violated the terms of a 2009 consent agreement requiring its Countrywide mortgage subsidiary to implement a loan modification program, the Arizona lawsuit alleges.

Hundreds of homeowners kept making their mortgage payments because Bank of America repeatedly assured them that their loans were being modified, Goddard said. Instead, many lost their homes anyway.

“Those people could have used that money for something else,” Goddard told The Associated Press. “They were deceived into continuing to make mortgage payments when they had no hope of saving their homes.”

Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto told the AP that the Silver State’s lawsuit was a last resort to try to get the bank to change its ways. It was filed after several discussions with bank managers led to assurances but little more.

“Clearly there is a disconnect between what Bank of America tells me at the management level and what’s happening on the front line,” Masto said.

Masto said separate lawsuits show the bank’s problems with consumers are widespread.

“The only thing that I’m asking is that (Bank of America) give them a reasonable response in a timely manner,” she said. “It is, in my perspective, a callous disregard for what we are telling them.”

Nevada and Arizona are among the states hardest hit by homeowners who have defaulted on mortgages in the last few years as adjustable payments soared, people lost their jobs, and home values collapsed. One out of every 99 households in Nevada received a foreclosure notice last month, according to RealtyTrac Inc., and Arizona’s rate wasn’t far behind.

Trying to Put a Price on Bank Errors

November 21, 2010 By Steve Dibert 2 Comments

Gretchen Morgenson, NY Times

KUDOS to the Congressional Oversight Panel for publishing a thoughtful and thorough report last week on the mortgage documentation mess. It argued that, yes, in fact, these paperwork problems may have significant implications for banks, investors and the stability of the financial system.

Since mortgage paperwork flaws became front-page news this fall, the banks caught in the glare have characterized the problems as technicalities that are easily remedied.

Their responses sound a lot like Mike Wazowski, the assistant scarer in “Monsters, Inc.,” who is reprimanded for not turning in his daily reports. “Oh, that darn paperwork,” he tells his supervisor. “Wouldn’t it be easier if it all just … blew away?”

But the mortgage paperwork problems aren’t blowing away, and the panel report analyzes their implications in fine detail. It also questions the view, held by some overseeing the Treasury Department’sloan modification effort, that mortgage documentation errors have no impact on the program.

Phyllis Caldwell, chief of the Treasury’s Homeownership Preservation Office, articulated the Treasury’s view in her testimony before the panel, according to the report. She said false affidavits and other processing flaws weren’t problematic for the government’s modification plan, known as the Home Affordable Modification Program or HAMP.

Because loan modifications don’t require physical production of a mortgage and note, the Treasury has not been examining whether document flaws have an impact on its efforts, she said.

Ted Kaufman, the former Delaware senator who leads the panel, saw it differently on Thursday. “Financial institutions all say everything is fine, but prudence would dictate that we make sure,” he said. “Not that we don’t trust the banks, but let’s take a hard look at this thing.”

In an interview on Friday, Tim Massad, acting assistant Treasury secretary for financial stability, clarified his agency’s position. “We weren’t saying these problems aren’t serious,” he said. “They are extremely serious, they are clearly widespread, they do pose dangers and they need to be fixed. But based on the evidence today, we didn’t see a systemic risk to financial stability.”

STILL, the oversight report points out problems that arise if servicers modify mortgages under HAMP when they don’t actually have the right to do so.

First, the report said, borrowers may either be granted or denied modifications improperly. And paperwork errors may mean the government is paying modification bounties of $1,500 a mortgage to the wrong banks.

Treasury officials told the oversight panel that if ownership of the mortgage was not properly transferred, the government could claw back incentives paid to the wrong institution.

But such a solution may not be feasible, the report concluded. And even if the Treasury chased down a loan servicer to return the incentive money it received in error, the government would have essentially handed that bank an interest-free loan for the period it kept the funds.

Filed Under: Mortgage News Tagged With: banks, Business News, Congressional Oversight Pane, Congressional Oversight Panel, Economy, foreclosure, Foreclosure Rate, HAMP, Home Sales, Housing Crisis, Loan Modifications, mortgage modification, Recession, Treasury, Treasury Department, Wall Street, Welcome to MFI-Miami

Treasury Admits It Hasn’t Fined Banks For Failing To Comply With HAMP

November 19, 2010 By Steve Dibert 3 Comments

William Alden, Huffington Post

A top Treasury department official said Thursday that the government has still not imposed any fines on banks that do not comply with the Obama administration’s mortgage modification program.

In testimony before a House Financial Services subcommittee, Phyllis Caldwell, chief of Treasury’s Homeownership Preservation Office, said her department has pursued “non-monetary remedies” but has not actually imposed any fines on banks for not complying with the administration’s flagship $50 billion foreclosure prevention program.

Even in the midst of a growing controversy over allegedly fraudulent foreclosure paperwork, Treasury has not imposed any penalties on banks.

By many estimates, the Home Affordable Modification Program, which was launched last year, has been a failure. Although about 1.5 million borrowers were encouraged to sign up during its first year, 40 percent of those were kicked out of the program after initiating “trial” modifications, HuffPost’s Shahien Nasiripour and Arthur Delaney reported. The program was intended to help up to 4 million homeowners avoid foreclosure.

In his latest report to Congress, the special inspector general for TARP Neil Barofsky said the mortgage-modification program can actually cause borrowers to go into foreclosure, due to extra fees that can accumulate on modified loans. The Government Accountability Office reported inMarch and in June not only that Treasury has not levied any fines on mortgage companies, but also that it hasn’t even finalized guidelines for doing so.

After bank officials admitted that they had employed people who approved foreclosure documents without reading them, big banks including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America last month temporarily halted their foreclosures. A Federal task force is investigating whether there has been criminal activity in the mortgage industry, and Bank of America faces a Federal racketeering lawsuit over its allegedly shoddy paperwork.

Still, Treasury has not yet punished these banks in any significant way. “To date we have not gone back to take back incentives that have already been paid, but we have pursued many of the non-monetary remedies, including further actions and evaluations, and re-evaluations,” Caldwell told Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), chair of the subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity, after Waters repeatedly asked her if she had “levied any penalties or sanctions.”

Filed Under: Mortgage Fraud News, Mortgage News Tagged With: Business News, Economic Crisis, HAMP, Home Affordable Modification Program, Maxine Waters, mortgage modification, mortgages, Phyllis-Caldwell, Treasury Department