home loan

Bank of America is accused of hindering the US regulators to review foreclosure practices of the company, says the court filing.

The mortgage practices of BofA have been investigated by federal regulators and state attorneys general including the use of "robo-signers" to sign hundreds of unread foreclosure documents a day.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development inspector general's office conducted a review of the five largest mortgage servicers, including Bank of America, which is the biggest.

The Financial Times reported that Bank of America Corp plans to decrease its $850 billion portfolio of troubled home loans by about half within the following three years. However, the company spokespersons failed to detail what exactly the company would do to achieve this goal.

The company suffered hard times due to the housing crisis and the purchase of Countrywide Financial. Last month, Bank of America posted an unexpectedly sharp drop in first-quarter profit as higher expenses from delayed home foreclosures weighed on its mortgage business.

A new settlement is being promoted by the Obama administration to force the largest US banks to pay for reductions in loan principal worth billions of dollars following breakdowns in mortgage servicing.

According to the Wall Street Journal report if the settlement is reached some state attorneys general are also pushing for banks to pay more than $20 billion of civil fines or to fund a similar amount of loan modifications for troubled borrowers.

It takes longer time for Bank of America to answer phone calls from borrowers with distressed home loans. Besides, the bank loses more calls too, as reported by six months of Treasury Department reports.

The answering time for BofA has averaged 40 seconds or more each month since May when the US Treasury started collecting call-center data from the eight largest servicers in its mortgage modification program. Thus, BofA, the largest U.S. bank and the largest mortgage servicer, had the slowest answering speed in four of the six months.