By Paul Kiel, ProPublica, Dec. 17, 2012

The Independent Foreclosure Review is the government's main effort to compensate homeowners for harm they suffered at the hands of banks — and, as its name indicates, it's supposed to be independent.

But until recently, that was hardly the case with Bank of America. Supposedly independent, third-party reviewers would sit at a computer, analyzing each homeowner's case by going through hundreds of questions, such as whether the bank had properly reviewed a homeowner for a modification or had charged bogus fees. But the reviewers weren't starting from a blank slate. Bank of America employees had already supplied the answers, which the reviewers would have to override if they did not agree.

No evidence has emerged that Bank of America pressured reviewers to accept its answers, and the bank did not supply answers for the final questions: whether the bank should pay compensation and, if so, how much. But those ultimate determinations depended on responses to the preceding questions, and for reviewers the path of least effort was to accept the bank's answers.

This practice only ended a month after ProPublica published a story showing that Bank of America was doing much of the work itself. When that story was published, ProPublica hadn't yet learned that the answers the bank supplied showed up on the reviewers' computer screens as defaults, and Bank of America strenuously denied that it had compromised the integrity of the review. Since November, the reviewers now begin their analysis without the bank's answers.

Bank of America spokesman Dan Frahm confirmed the change: "Steps were taken" so that the independent reviewer, Promontory Financial Group, "could not view answers supplied by the Bank of America Claim Researcher."

Frahm maintained, however, that the change didn't mean the reviews completed under the prior system were tainted. Promontory's employees have always had the ability to "override any answer supplied by the Bank of America Claim Researcher," he said.

Advocates for homeowners aren't convinced. "It's hard to imagine" that Promontory's reviewers weren't influenced by having the bank's answers right in front of them, said Alys Cohen of the National Consumer Law Center. "As a result it seems obvious that the earlier reviews should be re-reviewed."

Potential Conflict of Interest

The Independent Foreclosure Review is the government's largest program to compensate victims of the banks' foreclosure abuses. 4.4 million homeowners are eligible, but homeowners must submit a claim to ensure they're covered by the review. As of the end of November, only 315,000 homeowners had done so, according to regulators, a low response rate of about seven percent.

Victims could receive up to $125,000 in cash compensation or, if possible, get their home back. The review is overseen by the nation's bank regulators, who were spurred to action in 2011 by the robo-signing scandal.

The review has been dogged by criticism since the outset, partly because of how it works. Banks hire and pay consultants to be the independent, third-party reviewers. Bank regulators must approve them, which the regulators say ensures the independence of the review. But critics argue that the consulting firms have other contracts with the banks and so have a conflict of interest: If the consultants anger the banks, they may lose future business.

For its "independent consultant," Bank of America hired Promontory. Promontory is also conducting the review for Wells Fargo, which has the second largest number of loans eligible for review (about 933,000) after Bank of America (1.3 million) of all the banks.

"A Technical Change"

As ProPublica reported in October, all four of the country's largest banks planned to participate heavily in evaluating whether homeowners were harmed, according to their contracts with the consultants. Of course, homeowners claiming their bank abused them were never told the same bank would be integrally involved in the review.

In October, ProPublica uncovered internal Bank of America memos and emails indicating that, while Promontory made the ultimate decision as to a homeowner's compensation, the bank was doing much of the review work itself.

When ProPublica first presented this evidence to Promontory, Bank of America, and the bank's primary regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, all three initially denied that Promontory was using analysis performed by the bank's own employees.

Now, even as Promontory and Bank of America confirmed they had changed their system to make the bank's analysis invisible to Promontory's reviewers, both companies insisted that the independence of the reviews had never been compromised.

"Promontory resources have always reviewed the files, performed all tests, and reached independent conclusions, without input or influence from Bank of America," said Promontory spokeswoman Debra Cope. "A technical change was made in November with respect to the visibility of information uploaded by Bank of America file preparers.... Although these responses were previously visible to Promontory reviewers, they never had any bearing on Promontory's independent testing processes."

OCC spokesman Bryan Hubbard said the OCC has a policy of not commenting on specific institutions, but added, "as we have stressed before, the OCC expects the independent consultants to exercise their independence in reviewing and evaluating each file. Our examiners are ensuring that occurs."

The NCLC's Cohen said the core problem with the Independent Foreclosure Review is that it is largely being handled in secret.

"At the end of the day, if the regulators and servicers want to put this behind them, they need the public to believe this is legitimate. Without transparency, you can't have real accountability."

Federal prosecutors hit Bank of America with a $1 billion lawsuit Wedesday, accusing the bank of mortgage fraud that contributed to the housing crisis. Bank of America became entangled in the scheme -- known as “High-Speed Swim Lane” or “Hustle” -- when it purchased Countrywide Financial in July 2008, just as the economy was slipping into recession. Countrywide, a mortgage lending giant, was already known for approving risky loans when it introduced its “Hustle” program to churn out more loans, effectively eliminating a system that ensured the mortgages were being made to buyers who could afford them. A top U.S. attorney said the bank’s fraud was “spectacularly brazen in scope.”

Via:

Wednesday's case, originally brought by a whistleblower, is the U.S. Department of Justice's first civil fraud lawsuit over mortgage loans sold to the big mortgage financiers, which were bailed out in 2008.

It also compounds the legal problems that Bank of America Chief Executive Brian Moynihan faces over the second-largest U.S. bank's disastrous July 2008 purchase of Countrywide Financial Corp, once the nation's largest mortgage lender.

According to a complaint filed in Manhattan federal court, Countrywide in 2007 invented and Bank of America continued a scheme known as the "Hustle" to speed up processing of residential home loans.

Operating under the motto "Loans Move Forward, Never Backward," mortgage executives tried to eliminate "toll gates" designed to ensure that loans were sound and not tainted by fraud, the government said.

This led to "defect rates" that approached 40 percent, roughly nine times the industry norm, but Countrywide concealed this from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and even awarded bonuses to staff to "rebut" the problems being found, it added.

Defaults and foreclosures soared, yet the bank has resisted buying back many of the defaulted loans from the scheme, which ran through 2009, the government added.

Much more at Reuters.

When students take out loans to pay for graduate and undergraduate school, most of them probably don't think they'll still be strapped with debt in their 80s. But according to new research, senior citizens account for nearly half of student loan debt in the U.S. ($36.5 billion). Some of them are still paying off loans from early in life, while others took on more debt when they returned to school during middle age. For these Americans, a college degree resulted not in a successful career but in a lifetime of debt.

And as if it weren't hard enough to start a new career and make your student loan payments, colleges are now withholding transcripts from graduates in loan default and playing bill collector for the U.S. Department of Education:

The US Department of Education says only that it “encourages” colleges to withhold transcripts, a tactic which the department, in a letter to colleges, claims coldly “has resulted in numerous loan repayments.” But particularly in a time when the real unemployment rate is stuck at over 15 percent, or, if long term unemployed who have given up looking for work are included, at 22 percent, it seems not just heartless, but counter-productive for schools to block their own graduates from obtaining a document they need to move on to a higher degree or to get hired in their chosen field.

“It’s worse than indentured servitude,” says NYU Professor Andrew Ross, who helped organize the Occupy Student Debt movement last fall. “With indentured servitude, you had to pay in order to work, but then at least you got to work. When universities withhold these transcripts, students who have been indentured by loans are being denied even the ability to work or to finish their education so they can repay their indenture.”

The growing tsunami of student loan defaults is more than a series of personal tragedies. It is killing the dream of many low-income students who saw college as the best chance to rise out of poverty, only to find that after borrowing heavily to pay for school, they cannot get the paper needed to document their accomplishments, cannot get a job and cannot even declare bankruptcy to escape their plight. Congress, after pocketing wads of bank lobbying cash, made it all but impossible to use bankruptcy to escape student loans, requiring a court finding of “undue hardship”—an almost impossibly high legal hurdle.

Last October, student loan debt topped the $1 trillion mark, easily surpassing the total credit card debt. Last year alone, as tuitions soared and scholarship aid plunged, college students borrowed a record $100 billion for tuition and expenses.