Multi-billion mortgage deal favors banks, critics claim

After a four-year effort to save her home, Courtney Scott feels like she’s running out of options.

“When I got started (in 2008) there was HAMP, there was HARP and there were FHA options,” she said. “So now, I’m in limbo. How could I not be eligible to for any of these doggone programs they’ve set up?” 

Two weeks ago, she filled out a form under a federally mandated foreclosure review process set up after widespread mortgage abuses came to light in 2010. On Monday, that program was cancelled as part of an $8.5 billion settlement between federal regulators and 10 banks. 

Separately, Bank of America agreed on Monday to pay more than $10 billion to Fannie Mae to settle claims over mortgages that soured during the crash, mostly loans issued by Countrywide Financial, now a BofA subsidiary. 

Five years after the housing bubble burst, roughly a million other U.S. homeowners trying to save their homes from foreclosure are stuck in the same limbo as Scott.

With the latest multi-billion-dollar settlements, the nation’s mortgage lenders are hoping to put the mortgage mess behind them. But critics of the deal fear it may also leave behind millions of foreclosed homeowners who got little or no relief from the lenders that helped create the mortgage mess in the first place. 

"I have serious concerns that this settlement may allow banks to skirt what they owe and sweep past abuses under the rug without determining the full harm borrowers have suffered," said Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, D.- Md., a member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and a vocal critical of the government regulators handling of the mortgage crisis.

Monday’s settlement brings to an end the government’s two-year case-by-case foreclosure review to identify victims of industry-wide mistakes and abuses.

Under the agreement, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and six other mortgage lenders will provide $5.2 billion in mortgage assistance and $3.3 billion in direct payments to wronged borrowers, according bank regulators. The other six include Aurora, MetLife Bank, PNC, Sovereign, SunTrust, and U.S. Bank. Four other banks — HSBC, Ally, EverBank and One West — are still in talks, said officials at the Office of the Controller of the Currency, which announced the settlement.

OCC officials said consumers will be better served under the deal because claims will now be paid more quickly. The program had proved so costly - more than $1.5 billion has been spent on individual reviews - that it was diverting funds that could have been used to pay claims, they said.

“When we began the Independent Foreclosure Review, the OCC pledged to fix what was broken, identify who was harmed, and compensate them for that injury,” Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry said in a statement. “While today’s announcement represents a significant change in direction, it meets those original objectives by ensuring that consumers are the ones who will benefit, and that they will benefit more quickly and in a more direct manner.”

OCC officials maintain that the amount set aside will be adequate to compensate homeowners who suffered a financial loss from one of the bank’s mistakes.

Courtney Scott has been fighting her mortgage battle for four years. She feels like she’s running out of options.

But critics of the process argue that, despite the high cost of the review program, the process wasn’t thorough enough to assess accurately whether a home had been wrongly seized.

“The only information that the reviewers were using to determine whether someone had been the victim of wrongdoing was the servicers’ files,” said Helene Raynaud, a senior official at the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, whose members advise homeowners facing foreclosure. “They did not systematically contact the counseling agencies or whoever else these homeowners may (have been) talking to. If the information was incomplete, how would they know?”

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