A week after it said it would resume some of its foreclosure proceedings, Bank of America has admitted to finding mistakes in some of those documents.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the bank looked at only "several hundred" of its foreclosure cases -- less than 1 percent of the 102,000 cases it will resubmit to courts in 23 states. Of that small sample, 10 to 25 cases had errors.
The problems, the WSJ says, are, according to the bank, not significant enough to constitute any "wrongful" foreclosures. They include misspelled names, an incorrect address and missing signatures, among others.
"I think it's a big issue because people are losing homes," Bank of America CFO Chuck Noski said last week, according to the New York Times' Joe Nocera.
A host of investors and the New York Fed, Nocera notes, are suing the bank for failing to meet its own underwriting standards on various mortgage bonds, claims the bank has vowed to vigorously defend. Nocera, however, is not too satisfied with Bank of America's reassurances on the foreclosure crisis:
"So there you have it. Having convinced millions of Americans to buy homes they couldn't afford, Bank of America is now revving up its foreclosure efforts on these same homeowners. At the same time, having sold tens of thousands of these same terrible loans to investors, it is going to spend tens of millions of dollars on lawyers to keep from having to buy back their junky loans.
Apparently, being the biggest bank in the country means never having to say you're sorry."
During his quarterly conference call last week, Bank of American CEO Brian Moynihan said, according to the Associated Press, "The teams reviewing the data have not found information which was inaccurate which would affect the plain facts of the foreclosure."
This means, according to the WSJ and to Joe Nocera, that Moynihan is confident that the homeowners being foreclosed on had in fact defaulted on their mortgages.
So far, no evidence has emerged in the paperwork to refute Moynihan's position.
Still, the bank has reportedly made mistakes. According to Florida's Sun Sentinel, the bank recently foreclosed on a house that didn't even have a mortgage. And then it admitted it was in the wrong.
Attorneys general from all 50 states have launched an investigation into potentially "deceptive" foreclosure proceedings at an array of mortgage companies, HuffPost's Shahien Nasiripour reported. And last week, Federal investigators launched an examination into whether these mortgage companies broke the law.