Independent Foreclosure Reviews: Doomed To Fail
Posted by Michelle Moquin on April 11th, 2013
Good morning!
I realize many people are still facing foreclosure. Here’s an interesting write from 4closureFraud via Credit Slips:
WHY THE INDEPENDENT FORECLOSURE REVIEWS WERE DOOMED TO FAIL
Apparently part of the bank flaks’ talking points regarding the foreclosure reviews is that to the extent homeowners harmed by wrongful foreclosures, they were actually drug dealers. The message: we didn’t foreclose on anyone who didn’t deserve it. We were just foreclosing on some scumbags and doing you all a favor by getting the meth lab out of the neighborhood before it blew up. We’re part of the war on drugs.
This talking point is particularly revealing, I think, both about how seriously our largest financial institutions take sanctity of contract, and about the nature of the whole independent foreclosure review sham.
Running a meth lab in your basement may be an event of default on a mortgage–but if that’s going to be the default that triggers a foreclosure, the bank is going to have to prove that you’ve been running a meth lab on the property. The lender’s relationship with the borrower is contractual, not moral. If the borrower does something morally objectionable, it only matters if there is a breach of the contract. If sanctity of contract matters as a social principle, then even meth lab owners rights’ must be respected. We have criminal forfeitures to the government, but that doesn’t result in civil forfeitures to private lenders other than pursuant to contract. We’ve seen this vigilante foreclosure line before.
I think this points at the fundamental problem of the independent foreclosure reviews: it was a process that was nominally supposed to provide a remedy for various legal harms, but it was not a legal process. Instead, it was an entirely ginned-up review procedure that lacked any legitimacy: the OCC and Fed were negotiating with the banks overconsumers’ rights. The gap between regular legal process and the “independent” foreclosure review process is where the problems lie. I have no idea if the outcomes would have been different from IFR if consumers were to actually prosecute their claims in court, but I do know this–their procedural rights would be have been clear and legitimately established and they would get a reasonably fair shake as a result.
Instead, what the OCC and Fed gave consumers was a jury-rigged, improvised kangaroo system. The avoidance of formal legal process is a hallmark of how bank regulators operate–no prosecutions, just consent decrees, informal supervisory feedback, etc. This is nothing new–the law firm Kaye Scholer got the short end of this stick in 1992 when OTS froze its assets for representing Charles Keating. That got a settlement real fast.
Informal, improved process might serve well-enough for prudential regulation, but it clearly will not do when dealing with consumer protection, because the process matters every bit as much as the outcomes. Absent a consistent, fair process, there will always be the suspicion that bank regulators were favoring banks (their true constituency) at the expense of consumers. Put another way, the independent foreclosure reviews were almost doomed to failure (although not necessarily as egregiously as we have seen) because their design lacked any legitimacy.
At this point, the foreclosure remediation situation is so bollixed up, that I can’t see any satisfactory resolution. I take some comfort in perhaps optimistically thinking that the great foreclosure cover-up might be the last gasp of the pre-CFPB age of bank regulation; hopefully the dynamics of regulation have changed sufficiently that we will not see something like the independent foreclosure review process emerge again. I wonder, though, will the prudential bank regulators ever learn that they cannot keep dealing with banks through ad hoc, informal processes if they want political legitmacy? Do they even care? And if not, can we make them?
*****
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April 11th, 2013 at 10:24 am
Stop Waiting So Long at Your Doctor’s Office
I once sent a doctor a bill for $50 after I was forced to wait for more than an hour to see him. He called and apologized and said his office would contact me if he were ever running that late again when I had an appointment.
I waived my bill, and I never again waited for more than 10 minutes when I was scheduled to see him. If you’re not comfortable billing your doctor for your time, consider these tried-and-true techniques for cutting down your wait times…
Can you do it by phone or e-mail? In the US, the average wait time for a doctor’s appointment is 23 minutes. So it’s smart to handle whatever issues you can over the phone or via e-mail. Some insurers now pay doctors for these communications.
Phone or e-mail contacts are especially useful for discussing test results, changing a medication or following up on an earlier treatment. At your next appointment: Ask your doctor when phone and/or e-mail exchanges are useful and if there are certain hours when you can call in with questions or concerns.
Request the right day.
When you do need an appointment, you’re likely to experience the longest delays on Mondays and Fridays, because lots of people like to get things taken care of early in the week or just before the weekend.
For this reason, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are usually better options. To confirm whether this is the pattern at your doctor’s office, always ask which days are the slowest and try to book one of them. Also try to avoid school holidays.
Be smart about time of day.
You probably already know to ask for the first appointment of the day, but that appointment time typically gets booked quickly. In that case, ask for the first appointment right after the office lunch break (most practices do not book during lunchtime so that the staff can eat and doctors can catch up on any backups from the morning).
If that time is taken, ask for the last appointment of the day. Why is this a good time? Doctors’ offices close at a certain time of day, and appointments are typically back on schedule by then so that everyone can go home on time.
Also helpful:
Call an hour ahead of your appointment time to find out if the doctor is running late. That way, you can adjust your arrival time or reschedule if a long delay is anticipated.
Do your paperwork in advance. When booking an appointment, ask that all the forms you need to fill out be mailed or e-mailed to you in advance. Fill them out and bring them with you to the office about 20 minutes prior to your appointment time.
You may think that you’re not really saving time if you have to arrive early. But that’s not true. That fact is, you will be delayed if you have to fill out forms at the office. People with completed paperwork usually move to the front of the line!
Watch the clock.
No matter what you do, there will be times when you’ll have to wait more than you would like at your doctor’s office. Don’t just sit there. If you are waiting 15 minutes after your scheduled time, go to the desk and ask how much longer it will be. Do it again every 10 minutes until you are seen. The squeaky wheel does get the grease!
April 11th, 2013 at 11:14 am
You’re very welcome, Carrie, hope it all works out in the best way possible for you and the girls, and good for you for letting it go already, forgiving is for the forgiver mainly, you have to live your life with as much passion as possible and that can’t happen if you’re busy harboring anger, resentment, etc…towards any one person (or entire groups of people for that matter).
…it’s just too much negative energy output…go for the positives and the passion, it’s well worth it.
Luv, Zen Lill