ProPublica’s Paul Kiel has a fantastic story about the way in which the government has proved utterly toothless with regard to auditing its mortgage-modification programs, never mind publicizing or enforcing whatever violations it did manage to find. HAMP, it turns out, is a perfect example of what happens when the government mandates change without enforcing it: huge amounts of money get spent, to little or no lasting effect. Neil Barofsky provides the nut quote:
“If you have a set of rules for which compliance is completely voluntary and no meaningful consequences for those who violate them, having all the audits and reviews in the world are not going to make a bit of difference,” he said. “It’s why the program has been a colossal failure.”
Kiel’s story is based on the government audits of just one mortgage servicer — GMAC — since Treasury refuses to release the audits of anybody else. (It only released GMAC’s after GMAC itself, to its credit, consented to the release.) Treasury has paid servicers some $471 million in cash incentives — but taxpayers aren’t allowed to audit where that cash has gone, or whether it has been effective. It’s a fiasco.
HAMP was envisioned as a huge, $50 billion program; in the event, it never really took off, and only $1.6 billion has been spent so far, including $116 million paid to Freddie Mac for its ineffective auditing services:
It took several months for the unit to even get off the ground. In August of 2009, Treasury rejected Freddie Mac’s first reviews of servicers as inadequate, because they were “inconsistent and incomplete” and its staff was “unqualified,” according to a report by the TARP’s special inspector general. Freddie Mac promised to improve. That process took several more months.
As a result, for the program’s crucial first eight months there effectively was no watchdog. Nationwide, servicers filed to pursue foreclosure on about two million loans during that time.
When there was an audit, the auditors seem to have been just as incompetent as the servicers:
The December 2009 review says that 35 of the 247 loans auditors reviewed were denied because the homeowner was “less than 60 days delinquent.” In the report, auditors said that was the right decision in all but one case. But being less than 60 days delinquent is never on its own a legitimate reason for a servicer to deny a modification, according to the program rules. Homeowners are eligible for a modification even if they’re current on their loans, as long as they can show they’re in imminent danger of defaulting.
Another example: Auditors agreed that GMAC had correctly denied a homeowner because of a failure to sign a trial modification offer by Dec. 31, 2012, HAMP’s end date. That makes no sense, because the review took place in 2009. Treasury’s spokeswoman said this was a typo and that the homeowner was denied for a completely different reason.
There are several other examples in later reports of auditors signing off on denial reasons that have no apparent basis in the program’s rules. For instance, auditors cited “grandfathered foreclosure” as a legitimate reason for some denials. The spokeswoman said such loans had been in the foreclosure process before GMAC signed up for the program, but the program rules explicitly stated at the time that such loans were eligible.
I believe GMAC, here, that it’s the auditors who are at fault, rather than GMAC — that in many of these cases, the auditors’ stated reasons were generated by the auditors themselves, and often bore no relation to GMAC’s reasons. The fact is that ProPublica’s Kiel seems to be much better versed on HAMP than anybody tasked with enforcing the program:
Treasury defended the questionable denials, and in so doing raised even more questions. For instance, the spokeswoman said HAMP “does not specifically require servicers to evaluate loans that are less than 60 days delinquent.” But Treasury’s official guidance to servicers said such borrowers “must be screened.”
“It makes you wonder if the Treasury even knows the rules for their own program,” said National Consumer Law Center’s Thompson.
Well done to ProPublica, and Kiel, for getting this information and for making it public in a fully transparent and interactive way. There’s nothing in this story to make it seem that Treasury is anything other than fully captured by the big banks. Its reaction to ProPublica’s FOIA requests, in particular, seems unjustifiable. There’s nothing commercially sensitive in these documents: Treasury is just trying to protect the banks from fully-deserved bad press.
And while the state attorneys general — at least in states like New York and California — might have a more aggressive stance towards the big banks than Treasury does, the fact is that they, too, are simply not set up to implement real enforcement. Which is the main reason why the banks have de facto impunity in this country. Even when the government tells them to do something, they face no real negative consequences from failing to do it.
Felix Salmon is a financial writer, editor, and podcaster. A former finance blogger for Reuters and Condé Nast Portfolio, his work can be found at publications including Slate and Wired, as well as his own Substack newsletter.