Foreclosure Settlement Fails To Force Mortgage Companies To Improve

From Huffington Post: (click for full article)

Katie Diaz arrives at the Bronx County Courthouse hoping for clarity, if not a reprieve from the foreclosure case threatening her home. Five months have passed since she submitted an application to Bank of America seeking lowered mortgage payments. She is eager for a decision -– an approval, a denial or at least a negotiation.

She gets none of these things. Instead, in the course of a perplexing morning spent beneath the dim chandeliers of Courtroom 607, she absorbs a display of the chaos that still besets the nation's foreclosure proceedings, despite promises of improvement from major banks under a settlement with the Obama administration and state attorneys general.

Diaz, 52, is here for a settlement conference, a face-to-face meeting of lender and borrower mandated under the foreclosure process in New York state. As soon as she sits down at the wooden conference table, an attorney representing Bank of America confirms that she is under review for a loan modification. A few minutes later, the bank lawyer corrects himself: Her case has been closed, he says, because she supposedly never sent required documents. Fifteen minutes after that, he corrects himself again: Her file was never reviewed, because her paperwork has been sitting in the wrong office inside Bank of America.