A Low Bid for Fixing a Big Mess

As the Rajaratnam verdict captivated many on Wall Street last week, the institutions that service about two-thirds of the mortgages in this country offered to pay $5 billion to settle allegations about robo-signing and other shady practices that quick-step troubled borrowers out of their homes.

That figure is a fraction of the $20 billion that state attorneys general had apparently floated. If regulators accept the lowball offer, perhaps that would be because they haven’t dug deep enough.

Because evidence of extensive and abusive servicing practices does in fact exist. It is piling up at the offices of the United States Trustee Program, the arm of the Justice Department that monitors the bankruptcy system. Over the past six months, the trustee has drawn material from 95 field offices covering 88 judicial districts. The findings should dispel any notion that toxic servicing practices were atypical or have done no harm.

Clifford J. White III, director of the executive office of the United States Trustee, discussed some of the findings in an interview last week. But before we recount the ugly details, it’s worth noting the immense pushback the banks have mounted against the trustee office.

Banks have repeatedly tried to thwart the program’s actions, filing lawsuits and court motions to prevent officials from compiling evidence. Never mind that part of a trustee’s job is to investigate possible improprieties in foreclosures to determine if they are poisoning the bankruptcy system.

“We have faced consistent opposition by all of the major servicers,” Mr. White said. “We are currently facing 200 motions to quash our discovery requests. We also are facing upwards of 20 appeals either in district courts or in circuit courts.”

Those pushing back include Bank of America, Citigroup, G.M.A.C., JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, he said.

The banks typically make two arguments. First, they say the trustee program has no legal standing to delve into individual cases between lenders and borrowers because it is not a “party” to these disputes. Every court has rejected this claim. Nonetheless, the tactic has allowed servicers to stall trustees’ discovery requests.

In other cases, the banks agree to turn over information in specific matters of interest to the trustee program but refuse to provide details on their overall policies and procedures, which could show deep and systemic flaws.

Why are these institutions so afraid of a little sunlight?

To be sure, the nationwide investigation by the United States Trustee’s office represents an aggressive tack that big financial institutions are unaccustomed to. “The bankruptcy system provided an early warning sign of problems in mortgage servicing,” Mr. White said. “We began looking a few years ago at some of the violations of mortgage servicers, on a case-by-case basis. What’s different from the past is, if we find a facial discrepancy” — something that’s a problem on its face — “we are off the bat seeking discovery.”

When the banks have provided information, lawyers for the trustee program have often found extensive errors in amounts owed and charges levied. Needless to say, these mistakes do not typically favor the borrowers.

Mr. White declined to get specific. But the mistakes that his office has found fall into two broad categories. One involves inaccurate amounts that the banks say borrowers owe. The accuracy of these documents, which are filed with the courts, is crucial. Borrowers and bankruptcy judges overseeing their cases use them to determine payment schedules to cure defaults, for example.

Inaccuracies often arise because loan servicers fail to reflect that borrowers are in trialloan modifications, like those offered by the government, Mr. White said. As a result, though borrowers are paying the proper amounts, the servicer shows them falling behind. Then the bank moves to restart foreclosure.

IN other cases, proofs of claim filed by servicers are just wildly off base. In one matter, a bank claimed to the court that a borrower owed $52,043. After the borrower objected and a trustee asked for documentation, the amount owed dropped to $3,156.

Imagine what would have happened if the amount hadn’t been questioned?

The other problematic area showing up in the trustees’ inquiries relates to what Mr. White calls improper default servicing fees. These include charges for legal work, property inspections, insurance and appraisals.

Often, the fees charged to troubled borrowers are not even specified. Trustee program officials found a defaulted borrower who was charged $10,260.50 in “prior service fees” with zero documentation. In another case, a borrower fell behind after the lender doubled his escrow payments with no explanation or justification. Then the bank filed a motion to lift the bankruptcy stay so that it could foreclose.

“In fewer than 20 judicial districts,” Mr. White said, “we have identified hundreds of facial deficiencies, including cases in which we seek to investigate inflated or improper escrow charges and cases in which the mortgage servicer sought relief from stay so it could foreclose on a debtor’s home.”

Mistakes happen, of course. And loan servicers like to contend that if errors occur, they are rare and honestly made. But after sifting through the data produced by this investigation, Mr. White disagreed that problems are rare. “In Senate testimony, an executive from Countrywide said its error rate was 1 percent,” Mr. White recalled. “The mortgage servicer industry error rate might be 10 times higher, based on the number of cases we are looking at.”

“There are continued flaws in the process, and they are not merely technical,” Mr. White continued. “Those flaws undermine the integrity of the bankruptcy system. Many homeowners have been harmed, including where the lender has come in and said ‘we want to lift the stay and go back into foreclosure proceedings,’ even though they lacked a sufficient basis to do it.”

He went on: “There are enough examples of this to know that we are not dealing with small numbers.”

So an authoritative source with access to a lot of data has identified industry practices as not only pernicious but also pervasive. Which makes it all the more mystifying that regulators seem eager to strike a cheap and easy settlement with the banks.