Paperwork Submitted By Homeowners Seeking Loan Mods That Servicer Said Wasn't Sent Suspected To Be Floating Around Somewhere In India

Investigative reporter Paul Keil with ProPublica writes:

• In 2009, during the first few months of its participation in the program, Litton put tens of thousands of homeowners into trial modifications. That was easy, because nothing had to be documented. Under the agreements, if the borrower made the lowered payments for the three-month trial period, they'd receive permanent modifications.



• The hard part was for Litton to collect the borrowers' papers and crunch the numbers to verify the terms of the permanent modifications. That, he says, "turned out to be a total disaster."



• Wyatt led Litton's "Executive Response Team," which was charged with handling customer complaints. Litton employees, overwhelmed and undertrained, frequently made basic errors when calculating a homeowner's income, he says. HAMP guidelines often weren't followed, because Litton was "way understaffed" and couldn't keep up, he recalls. But the worst part was the way Litton dealt with homeowners' documents, he says.



• When homeowners faxed their documents, they didn't go to Litton, Wyatt says. They went to India, where a low-cost company scanned and filed the documents — but often misfiled or lost them.



• Wyatt says Litton routinely denied modifications because homeowners had not sent their documents when, in fact, they had. In a process internally referred to as a "denial sweep," Litton's computers would automatically generate denial letters for every homeowner who, according to Litton's records, hadn't sent their documents.



• But untold numbers of those documents had been lost on another continent. Wyatt complained about the practice in multiple meetings with senior management, he says, but managers were chiefly worried about reducing the overwhelming backlog.

For more, see At Goldman Sachs Servicer, ‘Total Disaster’

See also The Great American Foreclosure Story: The Struggle for Justice and a Place to Call Home.