NYDFS Addresses Concerns Regarding Loan Servicer's Noncompliance Issue

Mortgage Servicing

On October 21, New York DFS’s Superintendent Lawsky issued a letter to a large loan servicer institution regarding its systems and processes, most significantly the practice of backdating letters to borrowers. As a result of the alleged backdating issue, Lawsky’s letter highlights the servicer’s failure to meet state and federal agreements concerning its communication timing with borrowers on requests for mortgage modifications or the initiation of foreclosure proceedings. According to the letter, potentially hundreds of thousands of borrower letters were incorrectly dated. The NYDFS alleged that one letter in particular contained a time lapse of nearly a year: “[The servicer’s] system shows that [it] sent a borrower a pre-foreclosure dated May 23, 2013, stating that the borrower was in default and at risk of foreclosure. Yet, a conflicting notice record in [the servicer’s] system indicates that the notice was created on April 9, 2014.” The NYDFS stresses the urgency the servicer must take to remedy these issues by fixing its systems, and notes that it “intends to take whatever action is necessary to ensure that borrowers are protected.”