The End of MHA
The Making Home Affordable (MHA) program did what it intended to do- it Greased the Runways so unsuspecting homeowners operating in good faith would be forced into default. The final Program Performance Report Through The Fourth Quarter of 2016, includes the last results as all MHA programs ended on December 31. The report details the “improvements” made since 2009 when MHA was implemented and assesses the pathetic quality of certain servicers. Although delinquencies and foreclosures have dropped moderately since its inception, the oversight of servicers provided by MHA programs brought little improvement because of this policy that was created by the Fed to benefit the banks.
According to the report, since 2009, delinquencies have dropped from 6.1 million to 2.7 million. Over 3 million homeowners were underwater as of December 31, a drop from 10.2 million in 2009. And as of December 31, foreclosures starts are at 59.7 thousand, a difference of slightly over 76 percent of 2009’s 250.6 thousand.
MHA violated millions of homeowners while assisting only a pathetic 2.8 million homeowners during its time. MHA was designed to implement five guiding principles:
- Improving accessibility to foreclosure alternative programs for homeowners experiencing hardship
- Providing payment relief that meets the needs of homeowners based on their hardship
- Becoming sustainable through solutions designed to resolve delinquency and improve effectiveness long-term
- Being transparent by ensuring that the processes are clear and understandable by all parties
- Holding itself accountable by ensuring the appropriate level of oversight
The Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) failed on all accounts to deliver. Launched in Spring 2009, began a total of 2,511,344 trial loan modifications and 1,683,112 permanent modifications. Many modification worthy homeowners were denied modifications due to the sabotage by servicers who stood to make significantly more money if they could engineer a foreclosure by deliberately providing disinformation to the vulnerable homeowner. MHA’s Q4 results note that homeowners who remain in HAMP without defaulting are less likely to default (who came up with this brilliant conclusion?).
Many homeowners in delinquency who were not eligible for HAMP assistance found alternative solutions. 58 percent of those not eligible obtained alternative modification or otherwise resolved their delinquency and yet the homeowners who received modifications, received a modification from a servicer who had no authority to modify in the first place.
In addition to offering programs such as HAMP, MHA has compiled data on servicers so in theory, they may better address the needs of homeowners (right). The MHA Servicer Assessment results for Q4 2016 show which major servicers require improvement (all of them), and whether the needed improvement is slight, or substantial. Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Ocwen, Select Portfolio Servicing, and Wells Fargo were reported by MHA as only requiring minor improvement, and CitiMortgage is reported as requiring moderate improvement. However, MHA reports the need for substantial improvement at Nationstar Mortgage. MHA’s results found a 4 percent rate of income calculation errors within Nationstar mortgage, bringing the servicer’s score down.
The Hardest Hit Fund dealt with state-by-state problems in the housing crisis, rather than the nationwide programs from MHA. HHF programs interact with MHA programs and have assisted more than 292,000 homeowners as of December 31. HHF programs did not end on December 31 but have been extended through 2020.
Read the full report here and weep.
Filed under: foreclosure | Tagged: HAMP, making home affordable, modification |
I know all about this thanks for Neil and all the other good people he associates with. It is highly unfortunate but then again what should we have expected. Big government seems to fail at everything it attempts and we just let it continue to happen.
Just read the 10th Circuit Court Ruling in Colorado about Racketeering that nasty old Bank of America still continues to do. I have ALL the documents on FIVE (5) Loans that were allegedly completed on behalf of Urban Settlement Services as “attorney in fact” for phony, corrupt Bank of America. We need a nationwide moratorim on foreclosures in my humble opinion and the Trump Administration would be very wise to get to the bottom of all this racketeering, corruption, and scamming and lower the hammer on one of the Trump Family tenants in nasty old Bank of America. Moynihan knows full well about all this and needs to be behind bars!!! Instead all you read about is how great Bank of America is doing and how the cost of shares is going up!!!!! This is really bad. Semper Fi.
Reblogged this on California freelance paralegal.
Also meant to mention that the Servicers have our signatures anyway, off of the checks where we made the monthly payments on the mortgage, and can photoshop them onto new Note Payable forms from those.
In response to Rhody’s comment: The servicers offer a Temporary Modification (like my husband’s and mine) purely to get the signatures to photoshop onto a new Note Payable to replace the one that got shredded by Countrywide, more likely, since I have heard there are computer programs the servicers have that predict exactly when the homeowner(s) will default. The permanent modification offer made to us after complying with the temporary modification terms was useless and insulting, offered little real relief to us, and we did not take them up on it. Then when our Countrywide loan started to be foreclosed by Bank of America who took over Countrywide, they had a copy to use to recreate the note. There is at least one court case supposedly (I have seen it online) where there is an internal Countrywide former employee who admitted in court testimony that all the original notes were shredded as a matter of course. So there were no originals of record for Bank of America to inherit in the purchase of Countrywide – yet guess what – since there was a record in the computers, I guess, at the foreclosure appeal we went through (in our nonjudicial state) where Bank of America was foreclosing on us, we were presented with a copy of an “original” note with blue ink signatures that looked photoshopped or as if they had been the result of a color copy machine. They were a lighter blue than real original ink, and too evenly colored to be original signatures. I am also pretty sure my husband used a black pen of his own that he carried around with him to sign the papers at the time of “closing”. Last I heard, financial cons or fraud was not just a civil matter, it was a crime. There used to be a “Bunko” squad in the police departments. Am I wrong on that? If not, how can our government, judiciary, state Bars, and lawyers who are officers of the courts look the other way and be aiding and abetting this huge crime?
Rhody. The bank used a fraud mod to get my signature on a document for a modified payment of $467 per month. then they later disclosed that $2900 in fees were added and the true payment on the fraud mod was $1028 so yes they use fraud mod documents to collect the homeowners signature to do what ever benefits the bank.
In my case this is a clear violation of the Truth in Lending Act. But the burden is on me to first be aware of such a violation and prosecute in the courts. When it comes to evidence, the documents are in my hand, including an inhouse document with a heading DO NOT COMMUNICATE TO THE CUSTOMER with the $1028 payment amount. They accidently provided this document in a their response to a complaint I filed with the CFPB
By getting a signature from
Me they made a record of a modification. This is a requirement to collect FDIC insurance on an inflated loan they generated by adding in their fees that were not allowed in a HAMP.
Home Affordable Modification Program(HAMP) may be mostly a scheme to get the signatures of homeowners by the servicers who may have lost original promissory notes. When they default on the newly modified loan, the servicers could legally foreclose.mortgage. Does this make sense?