Thomas Curry keeps insisting the decision to end the independent foreclosure review will deliver fatter checks to more borrowers.
"Our new approach will get more money to more people much more quickly," the Comptroller of the Currency said Feb. 13.
But where's his proof?
The government's deal with 13 servicers to end the unwieldy review of 4.2 million mortgages affected by the 2009-10 robo-signing scandal may indeed get money to borrowers faster, but it will not ensure they receive more money.
That's because the government does not know which borrowers suffered what degree of harm.
The settlement should fit the harm, but the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is making the harm fit the settlement.
According to an amended deal revealed last week, 13 firms will pay $3.6 billion to these borrowers. The servicers themselves will slot each borrower into one of 11 categories, depending on their circumstances. The OCC has pledged to review the servicers' decisions, but borrowers will have no say and no way to appeal.
The Comptroller's Office has not yet put a dollar figure on any of the 11 categories.
Instead, the agency plans to wait to see how many borrowers the servicers slot into each category and then the agency will assign a corresponding payment. That way the money paid out will match the total committed by the servicers.
The OCC did release a matrix last June with 13 categories of harm, and the corresponding payouts ranged from $1,000 to $125,000.
The agency has condensed the number of categories to 11 and says it is now reworking the dollar payments. It won't say when the new numbers will be made public, which undercuts the agency's promise to have checks arriving in borrowers' mailboxes within weeks.
But the OCC has said that every borrower, regardless of harm, will receive some remuneration. And it has confirmed the maximum payment to any single borrower will be $125,000, but the agency has never explained how it set that ceiling.
Among the circumstances that would have earned the maximum payout under the June 2012 matrix was a borrower who was foreclosed upon even though the loan was not in default. If that happened to me, I'd want more than $125,000.
The national newspapers have dug into this story and lawmakers are demanding better, deeper explanations from federal regulators.
I think it's becoming increasingly clear that the Comptroller's Office moved to settle too quickly. The agency should have held off settling with servicers until it had more information.
The consultants who were reviewing the mortgages claim they were on the verge of giving the agency the first set of statistical data on how much harm had been inflicted when the agency pulled the plug on the review and settled with the servicers. A pilot remediation project was in the works, too.
It's natural to be skeptical of the consultants; they've all just lost lucrative work. But they did spend the past year-plus trying to figure out which foreclosures resulted from a servicer's error so, like it or not, they are in the best position to assess borrower harm.
If the Comptroller's Office had waited for the consultants' preliminary results, then at least it would have some justification for the settlement's dollar figure.
The OCC says it arrived at the cash portion of the $9.3 billion settlement through a careful calculation.
