How a Wells Fargo Counting Error Cost Hundreds Their Homes
Calculating homeowners’ eligibility for mortgage modifications should have been straightforward. But an automated decision-making tool contained an error for five years.
In a short section of its most recent quarterly report, Wells Fargo revealed that for more than 5 years, beginning in April 2010, the company made “an automated miscalculation” that dropped 625 mortgage holders below a threshold where they could receive a loan modification. 400 of these people subsequently had their homes foreclosed on. Wells Fargo finally caught the error in October 2015.
Coverage of the problem described it as “,” or even “.” The description in the SEC filing, meanwhile, raises as many questions as it answers: “This error in the modification tool
