Foreclosure Crisis: Working Toward a Solution. March Oversight Report

摘要

To help individual families and to stabilize the economy, Congress has pressed Treasury to devise a plan to deal with foreclosures. The Congressional Oversight Panel was explicitly instructed to review the effectiveness of foreclosure mitigation efforts undertaken by Treasury under the authorization of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. To develop this report, we explored the available data and discovered how little is known about the current state of mortgage performance across the country. The ability of federal banking and housing regulatory agencies to gather and analyze this data is hampered by the lack of a nationwide loan performance data reporting requirement on the industry. Consequently, there is no comprehensive private or government source for accurately tracking loan delinquencies and loss mitigation efforts, including foreclosures and modifications, on a complete, national scale. No federal agency has the ability to track delinquencies and loss mitigation efforts for more than 60 percent of the market. Existing data are plagued by inconsistencies in collection methodologies and reporting, and the numbers are often simply unverifiable. Worse still, the data that are collected are often not the data needed for answering key questions, such as, what are causing mortgage defaults and why loan modifications have not been working.