Mortgage loan servicers have a wide range of responsibilities. However, does everything servicers do constitute “servicing”? Or do servicers do some things that are not “servicing”?

The answer is important because the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act and its Regulation X impose strict obligations on servicers to respond to certain borrower communications related to “servicing,” but not to nonservicing. The courts, including two recent federal courts of appeals, are drawing fine lines between the two.

RESPA requires a mortgage loan servicer to respond in a timely manner to a borrower’s request to correct errors relating to “allocation of payments, final balances for purposes of paying off the loan, or avoiding foreclosure, or other standard servicer’s duties.” Section 1024.35 of Regulation X specifies that a servicer must acknowledge, investigate, and respond to a borrower’s “notice of error” within strict timeframes, so long as the notice is in writing and provides enough information for the servicer to identify the account and the asserted error. In addition, after receipt of a notice of error, a servicer is prohibited, for 60 days, from furnishing adverse information to a consumer reporting agency regarding any payment that is the subject of the notice.

Section 1024.35 then provides a list of covered errors that are subject to those requirements. The list includes errors that could arise in typical servicing activities – errors related to the acceptance, application, or crediting of borrower payments; and to disbursing amounts for taxes, insurance premiums, or other charges. The list of covered errors also includes those that could arise in default servicing – errors related to providing information regarding loss mitigation options, making foreclosure notices or filings, moving for foreclosure judgments or orders of sale, or conducting foreclosure sales.

Then, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (“CFPB”) included a catch-all provision to section 1024.35, such that a covered error includes “any other error relating to the servicing of a borrower’s mortgage loan.”

Courts have been considering the scope of those responsibilities since even before the CFPB issued that list in 2013. Recently, two circuit courts of appeals have indicated that some activities of servicers do not constitute “servicing,” particularly where loan modifications are involved.
Continue Reading Mortgage Servicing “Notices of Error” – Does The Catch-All Catch It All?