Complaining to the Treasury Department forces the bank to expedite your request for a loan mod because the Treasury Department can shut a bank down. Your bank can be fined and is quaking over the idea that US Treasury agents could set up camp inside the bank eyeballing their every move. For the banking community this is akin to a 9.5 earthquake on the San Andreas.
To fight the banks, preparation is crucial. File your complaint with the Office of the Comptroller, a subsidiary of the US Treasury. Within 48 hours the executive office of the bank will send your mod request directly to one of their finest escalation teams. You will get an almost immediate response.
To file, got to www.OCC.gov and on the home page click on Dispute Resolution on the right column, then click on Consumer Complaint and under Customer Assistance Group, click the Online Customer Complaint Form link and file your complaint. Then sit back and wait as tremors cause your bank to spring into emergency mode.
Wait 30 days after making your written request for a loan mod before you file the OCC complaint or the bank will say that you did not give them enough time to address your request.
OCC regulates all of the big National Banks. If your bank is not a National Bank, then it will be handled by the Office of Thrift Supervision at www.ots.treas.gov. The website has no online complaint form, so you will need to print, fill it out and fax or mail it.
This strategy is extraordinarily effective as the bank can be fined $10,000 for lack of response within 60 days. If the bank receives 10,000 complaints from the OCC at $10 grand apiece that is a loss of $1OO million dollars per year.
The little guy wields uncommon power now that you can create your own natural disaster for the banking industry.
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Hi Debi,
Fines for the banks is great news isn't it? Please keep us posted as to your client's progress with the lender. I want to get this information out to as many agents as possible so that we can all begin to put pressure on the banks. As you and I know, most mods get turned down and clients eventually need to turn to us for short sale assistance. However, reducing the amount of time that clients have to go through the mod process helps them to get out from under all the stress of impending foreclosure more quickly.