Ben Hallman | Huffington Post |
“Like millions of Americans who tried to stave off foreclosure in recent years, Lanette Worles says her bank repeatedly lost vital paperwork she submitted, scuttling her chance at saving her home.
Now, as Worles attempts to collect on a legal settlement intended as a remedy to just this type of practice, she confronts a depressingly familiar predicament: The check for her share of the settlement has gone missing, too.
“It’s been a total nightmare,” Worles, who lives in the Detroit suburb of Allen Park, Mich., said of her effort to track down the check. It was apparently mailed months ago to the wrong address, despite her attempts to correct the mistake in advance. “It seems like such a simple fix,” she said.
Worles is one of 4.2 million homeowners who qualify for a share of the $3.6 billion in cash payouts as part of the foreclosure abuse deal. And she’s one of 400,000 whose checks could not be delivered because they were sent to the wrong address, according to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
That amounts to 10 percent of all foreclosure settlement checks mailed so far. The return-to-sender problem could go a long way toward explaining why such checks totaling nearly $1 billion have not yet been cashed.
It’s understandable that some of the people owed a check have been difficult to reach, given the nomadic lives many have lived following foreclosure. But if it turns out authorities could have made a greater effort to verify home addresses in advance of mailing out those checks, critics who have blasted the settlement as ill-conceived and poorly executed will have a new reason to complain.”