Industry News

Dubious Fees Hit Borrowers in Foreclosures

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

As record numbers of homeowners default on their mortgages, questionable practices among lenders are coming to light in bankruptcy courts, leading some legal specialists to contend that companies instigating foreclosures may be taking advantage of imperiled borrowers.

Because there is little oversight of foreclosure practices and the fees that are charged, bankruptcy specialists fear that some consumers may be losing their homes unnecessarily or that mortgage servicers, who collect loan payments, are profiting from foreclosures.

Bankruptcy specialists say lenders and loan servicers often do not comply with even the most basic legal requirements, like correctly computing the amount a borrower owes on a foreclosed loan or providing proof of holding the mortgage note in question.

“Regulators need to look beyond their current, myopic focus on loan origination and consider how servicers’ calculation and collection practices leave families vulnerable to foreclosure,” said Katherine M. Porter, associate professor of law at the University of Iowa.

In an analysis of foreclosures in Chapter 13 bankruptcy, the program intended to help troubled borrowers save their homes, Ms. Porter found that questionable fees had been added to almost half of the loans she examined, and many of the charges were identified only vaguely. Most of the fees were less than $200 each, but collectively they could raise millions of dollars for loan servicers at a time when the other side of the business, mortgage origination, has faltered.

In one example, Ms. Porter found that a lender had filed a claim stating that the borrower owed more than $1 million. But after the loan history was scrutinized, the balance turned out to be $60,000. And a judge in Louisiana is considering an award for sanctions against Wells Fargo in a case in which the bank assessed improper fees and charges that added more than $24,000 to a borrower’s loan.

Ms. Porter’s analysis comes as more homeowners face foreclosure. Testifying before Congress on Tuesday, Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, estimated that two million families would lose their homes by the end of the current mortgage crisis.

Questionable practices by loan servicers appear to be enough of a problem that the Office of the United States Trustee, a division of the Justice Department that monitors the bankruptcy system, is getting involved. Last month, It announced plans to move against mortgage servicing companies that file false or inaccurate claims, assess unreasonable fees or fail to account properly for loan payments after a bankruptcy has been discharged.

On Oct. 9, the Chapter 13 trustee in Pittsburgh asked the court to sanction Countrywide, the nation’s largest loan servicer, saying that the company had lost or destroyed more than $500,000 in checks paid by homeowners in foreclosure from December 2005 to April 2007.

The trustee, Ronda J. Winnecour, said in court filings that she was concerned that even as Countrywide misplaced or destroyed the checks, it levied charges on the borrowers, including late fees and legal costs.

“The integrity of the bankruptcy process is threatened when a single creditor dishonors its obligation to provide a truthful and accurate account of the funds it has received,” Ms. Winnecour said in requesting sanctions.

A Countrywide spokesman disputed the accusations about the lost checks, saying the company had no record of having received the payments the trustee said had been sent. It is Countrywide’s practice not to charge late fees to borrowers in bankruptcy, he said, adding that the company also does not charge fees or costs relating to its own mistakes.

Loan servicing is extremely lucrative. Servicers, which collect payments from borrowers and pass them on to investors who own the loans, generally receive a percentage of income from a loan, often 0.25 percent on a prime mortgage and 0.50 percent on a subprime loan. Servicers typically generate profit margins of about 20 percent.

Now that big lenders are originating fewer mortgages, servicing revenues make up a greater percentage of earnings. Because servicers typically keep late fees and certain other charges assessed on delinquent or defaulted loans, “a borrower’s default can present a servicer with an opportunity for additional profit,” Ms. Porter said.

The amounts can be significant. Late fees accounted for 11.5 percent of servicing revenues in 2006 at Ocwen Financial, a big servicing company. At Countrywide, $285 million came from late fees last year, up 20 percent from 2005. Late fees accounted for 7.5 percent of Countrywide’s servicing revenue last year.

“We’re talking about millions and millions of dollars that mortgage servicers are extracting from debtors that I think are totally unlawful and illegal,” said O. Max Gardner III, a lawyer in Shelby, N.C., specializing in consumer bankruptcies. “Somebody files a Chapter 13 bankruptcy, they make all their payments, get their discharge and then three months later, they get a statement from their servicer for $7,000 in fees and charges incurred in bankruptcy but that were never applied for in court and never approved.”

Some fees levied by loan servicers in foreclosure run afoul of state laws. In 2003, for example, a New York appeals court disallowed a $100 payoff statement fee sought by North Fork Bank.

Fees for legal services in foreclosure are also under scrutiny.

A class-action lawsuit filed in September in Federal District Court in Delaware accused the Mortgage Electronic Registration System, a home loan registration system owned by Fannie Mae, Countrywide Financial and other large lenders, of overcharging borrowers for legal services in foreclosures. The system, known as MERS, oversees more than 20 million mortgage loans.

The complaint was filed on behalf of Jose Trevino and Lorry S. Trevino of University City, Mo., whose Washington Mutual loan went into foreclosure in 2006 after the couple became ill and fell behind on payments.

Jeffrey M. Norton, a lawyer who represents the Trevinos, said that although MERS pays a flat rate of $400 or $500 to its lawyers during a foreclosure, the legal fees that it demands from borrowers are three or four times that.

A spokeswoman for MERS declined to comment.

Typically, consumers who are behind on their mortgages but hoping to stay in their homes invoke Chapter 13 bankruptcy because it puts creditors on hold, giving borrowers time to put together a repayment plan.

Given that a Chapter 13 bankruptcy involves the oversight of a court, the findings in Ms. Porter’s study are especially troubling. In July, she presented her paper to the United States trustee, and on Oct. 12 she outlined her data for the National Conference of Bankruptcy Judges in Orlando, Fla.

With Tara Twomey, who is a lecturer at Stanford Law School and a consultant for the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys, Ms. Porter analyzed 1,733 Chapter 13 filings made in April 2006. The data were drawn from public court records and include schedules filed under penalty of perjury by borrowers listing debts, assets and income.

Though bankruptcy laws require documentation that a creditor has a claim on the property, 4 out of 10 claims in Ms. Porter’s study did not attach such a promissory note. And one in six claims was not supported by the itemization of charges required by law.

Without proper documentation, families must choose between the costs of filing an objection or the risk of overpayment, Ms. Porter concluded.

She also found that some creditors ask for fees, like fax charges and payoff statement fees, that would probably be considered “unreasonable” by the courts.

Not surprisingly, these fees may contribute to the other problem identified by her study: a discrepancy between what debtors think they owe and what creditors say they are owed.

In 96 percent of the claims Ms. Porter studied, the borrower and the lender disagreed on the amount of the mortgage debt. In about a quarter of the cases, borrowers thought they owed more than the creditors claimed, but in about 70 percent, the creditors asserted that the debt owed was greater than the amounts specified by borrowers.

The median difference between the amounts the creditor and the borrower submitted was $1,366; the average was $3,533, Ms. Porter said. In 30 percent of the cases in which creditors’ claims were higher, the discrepancy was greater than 5 percent of the homeowners’ figure.

Based on the study, mortgage creditors in the 1,733 cases put in claims for almost $6 million more than the loan debts listed by borrowers in the bankruptcy filings. The discrepancies are too big, Ms. Porter said, to be simple record-keeping errors.

Michael L. Jones, a homeowner going through a Chapter 13 bankruptcy in Louisiana, experienced such a discrepancy with Wells Fargo Home Mortgage. After being told that he owed $231,463.97 on his mortgage, he disputed the amount and ultimately sued Wells Fargo.

In April, Elizabeth W. Magner, a federal bankruptcy judge in Louisiana, ruled that Wells Fargo overcharged Mr. Jones by $24,450.65, or 12 percent more than what the court said he actually owed. The court attributed some of that to arithmetic errors but found that Wells Fargo had improperly added charges, including $6,741.67 in commissions to the sheriff’s office that were not owed, almost $13,000 in additional interest and fees for 16 unnecessary inspections of the borrowers’ property in the 29 months the case was pending.

“Incredibly, Wells Fargo also argues that it was debtor’s burden to verify that its accounting was correct,” the judge wrote, “even though Wells Fargo failed to disclose the details of that accounting until it was sued.”

A Wells Fargo spokesman, Kevin Waetke, said the bank would not comment on the details of the case as the bank is appealing a motion by Mr. Jones for sanctions. “All of our practices and procedures in the handling of bankruptcy cases follow applicable laws, and we stand behind our actions in this case,” he said.

In Texas, a United States trustee has asked for sanctions against Barrett Burke Wilson Castle Daffin & Frappier, a Houston law firm that sues borrowers on behalf of the lenders, for providing inaccurate information to the court about mortgage payments made by homeowners who sought refuge in Chapter 13.

Michael C. Barrett, a partner at the firm, said he did not expect the firm to be sanctioned.

“We certainly believe we have not misbehaved in any way,” he said, saying the trustee’s office became involved because it is trying to persuade Congress to increase its budget. “It is trying to portray itself as an organ to pursue mortgage bankers.”

Closing arguments in the case are scheduled for Dec. 12.