Bank of America Corp (NYSE: BAC) announced the details of a plan on Wednesday which will partially forgive the debt of homeowners who are upside down on their mortgages. As part of the announcement, a Bank of America Corp (NYSE: BAC) executive expressed disappointment in the company’s overall efforts to get customers mortgages modified via the government’s Home Affordable Modification Program.
“We certainly know that as we rolled out the modification process we have not handled our customers to the standards Bank of America is accustomed to,” commented Jack Schakett, a Bank of America credit loss mitigation executive during a conference call with the press, in response to a question from a reporter about stories from homeowners of lost paperwork and frustration when applying for loan modifications.
Bank of America Corp (NYSE: BAC) has put just 11% of customers who are eligible for HAMP-modifications into permanent modifications, the lowest of the four large-cap banks participating in the program.
Schakett said that the company has been adding staff and now has more than 16,000 employees in the distressed homeownership area. He added that the Charlotte-based bank had put more HAMP borrowers into modifications in April than in any previous month.
“We continue to train and retrain to try to improve our process and we’ve done a lot of things to try to make sure we don’t lose documents anymore,” he said. “We do think the experience is getting better and better, but again, it’s still not the level we would hope it to be because we still have more customer complaints than we believe are acceptable.”
