IFR Scandal: Magnitude of Mortgage Servicing Failure

A remarkable tabulation of the more than 3 million homeowners found to have been victims of mortgage servicing errors or fraud was released last week by the Fed and other bank regulators.  About 25,000 foreclosures were started while homeowners were in bankruptcy, nearly 200,000 foreclosures were completed on homeowners in approved modification plans, and another 168,000 foreclosures sales were conducted while modification requests were pending. 

Recall that these wrongful foreclosure tallies include only servicing in 2009 and 2010, and that the 3 million estimated violations by 11 banks are out of a nationwide total of about 50 million mortgages outstanding, about 7 million of which were delinquent at any given time in that period. 

Worse, Senator Warren extracted an admission from bank regulators and the "independent consultants" at a hearing on Thursday (short version here) that neither the regulators nor the consultants checked the tally, which was produced by the bank servicers themselves.  The Fed and OCC also declined to release bank-by-bank tallies, or to share their investigation results with consumer victims who might want to seek compensation from the civil justice system.  If the large bank servicers are too big for the Fed and OCC to regulate, perhaps the CFPB can tackle this job when its mortgage servicing rules go into effect next January.