Multiple foreclosure articles from Carlos of Occupy Fights Foreclosures

Military foreclosure rate raises concerns

http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/mar/04/wrongful-foreclosures-military-banks/

The issue of banks improperly repossessing homes of U.S. military members may be worse than originally expected, based on a New York Times report published on Sunday.

The Times said four major banks — Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo — wrongfully siezed 700-plus homes of service members during the housing crash.

That new figure, based on anonymous sources, is particularly alarming because those reported repossessions could violate the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, a federal law that protects active members of the armed forces in situations such as foreclosures.

The new estimate is higher than previous ones that have come up in committee hearings or in court records.

(More at the link.)

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Early findings emerge from abandoned independent foreclosure review program

http://www.oregonlive.com/front-porch/index.ssf/2013/03/early_findings_emerge_from_aba.html

When regulators first announced a settlement deal ending a case-by-case foreclosure review program, it was suggested they had found fewer foreclosure errors than expected, a potentially embarrassing result for officials who had pursued the banks.

But newly reported details of the review program's early findings suggest that might not be whole whole story.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported the topline figure given by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency -- an error rate of just 4.2 percent among the self-selected and flagged foreclosures under review -- ignored big variations between servicers.

But a breakdown of the information provided to the regulator shows that more than 11% of files examined for Wells Fargo & Co. and 9% of those for Bank of America Corp. had errors that would have required compensation for homeowners, said people who have reviewed the figures. A narrower sample of files—representing cases selected by outside consultants—showed error ratios of 21% for Wells Fargo and 16% for Bank of America, the people said.

(More at the link.)

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Bernanke: Fed Takes Responsibility for Failure of Foreclosure Reviews

http://ecreditdaily.com/2013/03/bernanke-fed-takes-responsibility-failure-foreclosure-reviews/

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke took responsibility for the costly delays in getting compensation to 4 million homeowners who were victims of wrongful actions by lenders under the so-called Independent Foreclosure Review.

In a hearing before the House Committee on Financial Services Wednesday, Bernanke only spoke briefly about the 18-month failed reviews of foreclosures undertaken by more than a dozen mortgage services.

Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, D-New York, provided heated questioning, trying to get answers from Bernanke as to why it took more than $1.5 billion in payments to independent consultants and 18 months to scrap the Independent Foreclosure Review in favor of the recently announced $9 billion settlement.

“We can put a person on the moon; why can’t we solve this?” asked Maloney.

(More at the link.)

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How The Latest Foreclosure Settlement Lets Banks Off The Hook (Again)

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/03/04/1669761/how-the-latest-foreclosure-settlement-lets-banks-off-the-hook-again/?mobile=nc

Federal regulators earlier this year cut a settlement with the nation’s biggest banks that short-circuited an earlier review of foreclosure abuses. The new deal is meant to provide $9.3 billion in aid to distressed homeowners, while foregoing a thorough review process.

However, as the New York Times noted, that $9.3 billion headline number is much higher than the amount homeowners will actually receive:

Under the settlement, banks receive credit for the size of the outstanding loan balance, rather than the amount of actual assistance provided. For example, if a bank cut a borrower’s $100,000 mortgage debt by $10,000, the lender could then reduce its commitment under the settlement by $100,000. In a previous foreclosure settlement, the banks received credit only for the $10,000.

This obviously incentivizes banks to give small amounts of aid to homeowners with large mortgages, tallying the larger amount under the settlement while not providing much in the way of help. As Karen Weise detailed at Businessweek, the settlement also gives banks a helping hand in a variety of other ways.

(More at the link.)

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Carlos says about this one: "THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FORECLOSURE SETTLEMENT....."

A Home Foreclosure Settlement Gets Watered Down

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-04/a-home-foreclosure-settlement-gets-watered-down

There’s new evidence that a $9.3 billion settlement to help homeowners is less beneficial than it might seem.

First, a little history. In 2011 the federal bank regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, signed consent decrees with some of the U.S.’s major banks, ordering them to review their foreclosures and compensate borrowers where they found mistakes. That was separate from the $25 billion National Mortgage Settlement coordinated by 49 state attorneys general. The federal settlement was supposed to be the first time borrowers would have an independent review of their foreclosures.

Then, late last year, news leaked that the OCC was working on a new multimillion-dollar settlement with the banks. By the time the deal was announced in early January, it became clear that the new settlement papered over the flaws in what was supposed to be an independent foreclosure-review process the OCC had set up in 2011. The OCC said that process was slow, expensive, and wasn’t producing much proof that borrowers were harmed, though the Wall Street Journal last week reported that the error rates at some large banks topped 20 percent.

(More at the link)

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To serve and protect… banks?
With mega-banks illegally foreclosing on active duty members, the penalty is jail. But, as always, there's a catch

http://www.salon.com/2013/03/05/who_protects_our_servicemembers_from_financial_attack/

Wrapping themselves in the American flag is a popular pastime among our nation’s prominent institutions. But is it secretly possible for them to commit crimes against active duty members, and pay no price?

Imagine that you’re serving at a forward operating base in Afghanistan. You’ve been in country nine months, coping with hazardous and punishing conditions, trying to survive and return to your family. Then you get a call from your spouse that they’re about to be evicted from the family home. The sense of anxiety is acute, and so is the feeling of helplessness – you’re thousands of miles away, focused on your mission, and you’re wracked with regret and guilt, unable to protect your family from the tragedy and shame of foreclosure.

This has happened at least 700 times to servicemembers on missions overseas since the beginning of the foreclosure crisis in 2008. And it’s actually illegal; it violates the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, a statute that carries criminal penalties. The nation’s biggest banks have admitted to the conduct before Congress and in regulatory filings, and they only recently acknowledged that they illegally foreclosed on ten times as many servicemembers as they previously claimed. Any serious effort to hold banks accountable for routine abuse of homeowners should include prosecutions of this execrable behavior. But the government rolled out settlements years before the true depth of these violations ever began to come to light.

The SCRA’s text is very clear. It protects servicemembers serving overseas from a variety of legal proceedings, including custody cases, penalties under contracts, tax assessments and more. For the purposes of mortgages, there are two main protections. Lenders cannot charge an active-duty military servicemember more than 6% interest on their loans. And they cannot complete the foreclosure process while the servicemember is on active duty abroad, without obtaining a court order. These aren’t exceedingly complex regulations to figure out. “Lenders can easily determine who among their borrowers is active-duty military,” Congressman Brad Miller, who in 2009 co-authored amendments that strengthened the SCRA statute, tells Salon. “We know that they knew because the borrowers would tell them. They would say, ‘My husband is in Iraq.’ And the lenders obviously paid no attention to what SCRA required of them.”

(More at the link.)