Government watchdogs told a Senate panel Wednesday that the Obama administration’s effort to help homeowners avoid foreclosure isn’t working and that the Treasury Department has failed to fix the program.
Special inspector general for the financial bailouts Neil Barofsky said the program has not “put an appreciable dent in foreclosure filings,” during a Senate Finance Committee hearing on the $700 billion bank bailout. He also said the Treasury Department has ignored earlier demands that it set clearer goals for the program.
Elizabeth Warren, who chairs a separate Congressional Oversight Panel on the bailouts, said Treasury’s failure to act more quickly could be hurting the recovery.
More foreclosures could force down the price of homes and further hurt the already-ailing housing industry.
My daughter has been trying for a year to get help under this program. She is behind two months; now paying regularly but can’t ever catch up those two months. She submits documents, they want more documents, she submits those, but now the previous ones are all outdated. I might mention that she is a social worker who knows how to do the paperwork for all kinds of government programs. When she was a social worker for group homes for kids, I told her how child disability cases work, and from then on she was able to submit everything needed with a claim to get it approved. She has done foster care and adoption paperwork, and now investigates abuse claims against institutions who care for vulnerable adults, which has another whole set of paperwork involved. She has a Masters in Public Administration and has taken grant-writing courses. So she is hardly clueless about paperwork and bureaucracies. Yet she has not been able to complete the application for mortgage relief successfully.
Maybe this is why it isn’t working.
Susan Peterson