And here’s evidence that it’s failing:

Thus far, 728,686 struggling homeowners have been kicked out of the program; just 640,300 remain.

Through the first nine months of this year, “when HAMP has been at its apex,” according to SIGTARP, nearly 2.7 million homes have been subject to foreclosure notices, the report notes, citing data from research firm RealtyTrac.

“At that pace, foreclosure notices will have been sent to more than 3.5 million homes by the end of the year, an increase of 26 percent over the 2.8 million homes in 2009 and nearly five times the comparable 2006 number,” SIGTARP said.

The Los Angeles Times doesn’t have anything on the Barofsky report, either, but it does have a piece on how homeowners are ramping up lawsuits against the banks for playing Three-card Monte on these mortgage modifications:

For example, Jean C. Wilcox of Irvine has sued EMC Mortgage Corp., accusing it of stringing her along for three years while making several offers to modify her nearly $800,000 loan, losing documents repeatedly and never intending to permanently change the terms of the mortgage. An EMC spokesman declined to comment.
“It was just ‘extend and pretend,’ ” said Wilcox’s lawyer, Anthony Lanza of Irvine. “And it was like they had the fax machine hooked up to a shredder.”
Anaheim lawyer Damian Nassiri said his firm had filed about 100 lawsuits against mortgage lenders since 2007. Earlier suits alleged that lenders misrepresented terms of mortgages or engaged in other shady practices to foist abusive loans on borrowers. Most of his firm’s suits now accuse lenders of dealing in bad faith with borrowers who have become delinquent on loans.
Worse, Nassiri said, in cases where foreclosure was inevitable, banks misled borrowers into accepting trial loan modifications. The intent, he claimed, was “to get some kind of money out of them” while stalling actions to seize the homes.

The LAT reports that some suits are trying to get class-action status because they claim the problems are so widespread.

We need to see more reporting on this.

Ryan Chittum , a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is deputy editor of The Audit, CJR's business section. If you see notable business journalism, give him a heads-up at rc2538@columbia.edu.