Government Accountability Office: Foreclosure report: The GAO released a report last week entitled Mortgage Foreclosures: Documentation Problems Reveal Need for Ongoing Regulatory Oversight, which was compiled as a result of a probe House Democrats requested...

Between the servicing alignment initiative recently announced by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the consent decrees bank regulators struck with some top mortgage servicers last month, and possible national servicing standards from federal policymakers in the near future, there may be very little room left for state attorneys general and regulators to influence servicing practices going forward...

One of the most critical factors contributing to the foreclosure documentation debacle was a fundamental failure on the part of many of the nation’s top mortgage servicers to truly manage their foreclosure networks, and that’s one of the deficiencies federal bank regulators are trying to remedy in their recent consent orders, industry experts have concluded...

The mortgage servicing industry is going to have its hands full and then some as it faces multiple levels of regulatory and statutory requirements over its practices, raising the question of exactly how all of these mandates and protocols are going to interact and how servicers are going to interface with them...

The mortgage banking industry is concerned that the Federal Reserve’s proposed rule on escrow accounts for higher-priced mortgage loans – especially the vast expansion of escrow account disclosure – is duplicative, unduly burdensome, and may be superseded shortly after it is implemented by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau...

Some Congressional Republicans are making it increasingly clear that much of their concern with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has to do with the person currently overseeing its startup at the behest of President Obama, Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren...

The Department of Justice and the Department of Housing and Urban Development last week announced they had filed a civil mortgage fraud lawsuit against Deutsche Bank and its wholly owned subsidiary, MortgageIT, over some of its FHA lending practices...

Much of the mortgage industry remains abuzz with talk about the new proposed regulatory rules that would spell out what constitutes a “qualified mortgage” or “qualified residential mortgage.”...

The mortgage lending industry wants to use favorable legislation in Colorado as a model for other states to use in addressing neighborhood blight prevention via the accelerated transfer of abandoned property, one informed source confided to Inside Regulatory Strategies...

California. State Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Pacoima, is reportedly drafting his own version of anti- "dual track" legislation that would keep lenders and servicers from filing a foreclosure sale until a loan modification that has been requested by the borrower is denied...