The evaluation report released this morning by the Federal Housing Finance Agency's (FHFA) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has triggered a call for a Congressional hearing.   The OIG report claimed that servicers employed by Freddie Mac have not handled the serious category of consumer complaint termed "escalated" in a timely manner nor reported them correctly to Freddie Mac.  OIG also found significant deficiencies in the oversight of servicers by Freddie Mac and of Freddie Mac by FHFA and that no penalties had been imposed on services for failure to conform to agency and company servicing guidelines.

Congressman Elijah E. Cummings (D-MD), Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent a letter today to Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) requesting that the Committee hold a hearing with Edward DeMarco, the Acting FHFA Director, and Steve A. Linick, the Inspector General of FHFA. Cummings requested that the Committee also invite representatives from Bank of America, CitiMortgage, Provident, and Wells Fargo - the mortgage servicers singled out in the Inspector General's report as having particularly failed to follow FHFA's requirements for handing and reporting the escalated cases they receive. 

"Today's report reveals the latest in a sorry string of failures by FHFA leadership to protect American homeowners," said Cummings. "After so many reports documenting the abuses homeowners have suffered at the hands of mortgage servicers, it is unconscionable that FHFA has failed to require mortgage servicers to properly handle tens of thousands of homeowner complaints."

Cummings has had a fraught relationship with DeMarco for some time, mainly centered around FHFA's refusal to allow Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to write down principal balances on delinquent underwater mortgages.  Cummings recently sent a letter, signed by 44 other Democratic house members, to President Obama demanding the removal of DeMarco and appointment of a permanent FHFA director.