Lost in the swamp: $448M for failure

It’s hard to sum up the true total value of homeownership, one of the bedrock tenets of the American Dream.

But there’s a clear price tag — $2.4 billion — for the amount of taxpayer money residential mortgage services and investors have made off with for cancelled HAMP modifications.

At least 155,000 of those homeowners lost their homes.

That’s the latest tally from watchdog SIGTARP, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which has been blasting servicers’ mismanagement, waste, and abusive practices, and urging Treasury to crack down, for years.

Treasury could have turned off the money spigot for payments related to time periods when servicers “failed to perform at an acceptable level,” SIGTARP’s latest report to Congress, published last month, says.

But Treasury paid $448 million, even after finding the performance of Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Ocwen, Cit- iMortgage, and Nationstar needed “substantial improvement,” in some cases for multiple quarters, said SIGTARP, recommending a claw back of taxpayer dollars when servicers are found to violate Treasury’s contracts.

There’s a lot more cash on tap for servicers and banks, and little reason to expect that Treasury, now helmed by Steven Mnuchin — who ran OneWest when it aggressively foreclosed on thousands of homes — will crack down on abuses.

Treasury shells out $650 million a quarter for HAMP and other Making Home Affordable programs, with $11 billion in MHA payments slated for servicers through 2023.