Some of the country's biggest banks were on pace to find a higher rate of past foreclosure mistakes than regulators disclosed in January when they halted a review in favor of a $9.3 billion settlement for homeowners, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The figures show wide discrepancies in how banks performed in the review and raise questions among some observers about how the process was conducted. The banks were ordered in 2011 to hire consultants to review foreclosures in search of possible errors that could result in compensation for borrowers. Nearly 6.5 percent of files reviewed unveiled errors requiring compensation, officials at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said in January. They later revised the error rate to 4.2 percent after requesting new data, raising the total number reviewed to roughly 100,000 files. But a breakdown of the information provided to the regulator shows that more than 11 percent of files examined for Wells Fargo & Co. and 9 percent of those for Bank of America Corp. had errors that would have required compensation for homeowners. A narrower sample of files—representing cases selected by outside consultants—showed error ratios of 21 percent for Wells Fargo and 16 percent for Bank of America.
