BANK OF AMERICA TRIES TO DISCREDIT WHISTLEBLOWERS

FROM THE CONSUMERIST

Bank Of America Attempts To Discredit Statements Of Former Employees

By Chris Morran July 12, 2013

(taberandrew)

Last month, it was revealed that six former Bank of America employees and one ex-contractor for the bank, had given sworn statements in a lawsuit filed against BofA, and that these statements painted a picture of a system that deliberately lost mortgage modification paperwork and rewarded staffers for pushing employees into foreclosure. Now BofA has issued a detailed rebuttal of those allegations and why it believes that these statements misrepresent the truth.

The statements alleged a variety of bad behaviors, almost all involving the federal HAMP program that was intended to allow distressed homeowners the chance to seek a loan modification to make their loans more affordable.

“The declarants wildly misrepresented their duties at the Bank,” reads a document [PDF] filed by BofA earlier today with a U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, “and most had only minimal involvement with HAMP—or none at all.”

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The bank takes particular issue with the job descriptions given by the former employees in their statements. In the court papers, BofA claims that three of those people who provided statements were “call-center operators whose only involvement with HAMP would have been to forward calls to other departments if a borrower might qualify.”

But in their sworn statements, given under penalty of perjury, those employees described their positions as 1: a “Senior Collector of Loss Mitigation/Mortgage;” 2: a “collector,” whose job “consisted of speaking on the telephone with homeowners who were calling regarding a loan modification that they had applied for as part of [HAMP]; 3: a “Home Retention Specialist” at a call center in Fort Worth, Texas.

BofA claims that the contractor, who worked for a company called Urban Settlement Services, was only responsible for “processing customer complaints, not HAMP applications.” Though it does not state that this contractor didn’t deal with HAMP-related complaints.

The bank tries to discredit the statement of one ex-employee by alleging that he never worked as an underwriter as he claimed in his statement. However, it’s worth noting that BofA does not dispute his assertion that he was a Case Management Team Manager. Most of his statement deals with incidents he witnessed during his tenure in that position.

BofA does admit that the former Countrywide loan originator who joined the bank staff when it acquired the failing mortgage giant was indeed working as an underwriter but claims, “he was tasked solely with running income calculations and had no role in making eligibility determinations as he claims.”