SunTrust is in compliance with all of the servicing requirements of the National Mortgage Settlement, the settlement’s monitor said in a report published early Tuesday.
Joseph Smith, the monitor of the National Mortgage Settlement, said in the report that SunTrust did not fail any compliance metrics that his team tested during the second half of 2017.
SunTrust previously failed one of the NMS’ servicing requirements, which deals with the accuracy of information on Proof of Claims filed in Bankruptcy Court, for five straight quarters.
According to Smith’s office, SunTrust failed Metric 4 in the fourth quarter of 2015 and all four quarters of 2016 because the bank changed the official Bankruptcy Form 410A (the Mortgage Proof of Claim Attachment) to provide information differently than established by the official form.
Smith’s office said that the SunTrust’s failure to adhere to Metric 4’s stipulations was “widespread” during the quarters in question.
After identifying the issue, Smith’s team required SunTrust to devise a plan to remedy the errors, which the bank subsequently did.
In the report, Smith’s office laid out the steps that SunTrust was required to go through to address the compliance failure.
“Because the failure was widespread, I required SunTrust to file amended POCs in all active bankruptcies where the errors on the original, incorrectly prepared forms were greater than $1,” Smith’s office noted in its report.
”In addition, I required SunTrust to make refunds to borrowers from whom SunTrust had collected more than the borrower actually owed based on the incorrect forms,” Smith continued.
“Finally, for those borrowers who were no longer active in bankruptcy, I required SunTrust to mail letters to the borrowers and the bankruptcy Trustees informing them of the errors in the original forms and providing the borrowers the opportunity to contact SunTrust if the borrower suffered any damage as a result of the errors,” Smith said.
According to Smith, SunTrust completed and implemented the remediation plan in May 2018.
“SunTrust continues to make progress under the NMS,” Smith said in a statement. “I will continue to monitor SunTrust’s consumer compliance obligations and will report my findings to the Court and the public on the final testing period in the future.”
