By BRENT KENDALL
December 2011
The Justice Department faces the daunting task of tracking down more than 210,000 alleged victims and determining how to compensate them, following last week's $335 million fair-lending settlement with Bank of America Corp.'s Countrywide unit.
Minority borrowers who suffered the greatest harm from Countrywide's allegedly discriminatory mortgage-lending practices could be the most difficult to locate, observers say, because they are the victims most likely to have lost their homes to foreclosure and subsequently moved several times.
"It's going to be really difficult to find those families," said Janis Bowdler, a policy director at National Council of La Raza, a Latino civil-rights group.
The landmark case is also the first by the Justice Department that accuses a lender of steering borrowers to more costly mortgages, creating novel and possibly difficult questions on setting monetary payments for some victims. For example, how should the government compensate a family that both lost its home and was unfairly steered into a more costly subprime loan?
"It's not easy to calculate that kind of thing as a dollar amount," said Nina Simon, director of litigation for the Center for Responsible Lending. "No statistical model could compensate someone for that kind of harm."
The agreement, announced last Wednesday, was the largest residential fair-lending settlement in history. It resolved allegations that Countrywide and its subsidiaries engaged in a widespread pattern of discrimination against black and Hispanic borrowers from 2004 to 2008. If you think your are a victim Contact Bank of America...
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