HUD’s foreclosure report

A federal report released this week found that employees at major banks who forged signatures, made up fake job titles and falsely notarized paperwork often did so because they were ordered to by their bosses, reported The Washington Post’s Brady Dennis.

The report issued by the inspector general of the Department of Housing and Urban Development found that illegal foreclosure practices were not just encouraged at the direction of managers at the banks, but some employees were judged by how fast they could move along foreclosures, Dennis reported.

“Investigators pieced together a picture of a deeply flawed system riddled with errors, where employees often had little or no training, where managers encouraged wrongdoing and where haste trumped all else,” Dennis wrote.

In one review of 36 foreclosure filings, JPMorgan Chase was only able to provide documents showing the amount the borrowers owed in four of the cases. Of those, three proved inaccurate, investigators said.

As Dennis wrote: “I believe the reports we just released will leave the reader asking one question: How could so many people have participated in this misconduct?” David Montoya, HUD inspector general, said in a statement. “The answer: simple greed.”

Montoya is right and wrong.

He’s right that greed is at the center of all this foreclosure mess and the scandal that led five major banks -- — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial -- to settle charges that they were falsifying foreclosure documents.

But he’s wrong that many people will give a hoot about the HUD report that the bankers were “robo-signing” legal papers certifying that they had personal knowledge of the facts of a foreclosure when they did not. No, harsh, unsympathetic, self-righteous judgment is what I hear for people who have been or are being pushed out of their homes. It doesn’t seem to matter that many people are struggling to pay their mortgage because they lost their job or suffered an illness. Based on the mail I get every time I write about efforts to help homeowners facing foreclosure, many people are far harder on struggling individuals than on the financial companies that caused the housing bust.

So let’s see if Montoya is right. The Color of Money Question of the Week: What do you think of HUD’s report on the behavior of bankers in foreclosing on homeowners? Send your responses to colorofmoney@washpost.com. Be sure to include your full name and city. Put “HUD’s Foreclosure Report” in the subject line.

How To Make Your Employees Miserable

You might have read that headline and said to yourself: My boss doesn’t need a guide, he (or she) can write the book on how to make a worker’s life miserable.

Over the past 15 years, Teresa Amabile, a professor and director of research at Harvard Business School, and Steven Kramer, a developmental psychologist and researcher, have studied what makes people happy and engaged at work.

What did they find?

Employees are miserable because they don’t have meaningful work, and that’s often because many leaders, from team managers to CEOs, are “surprisingly expert at smothering employee engagement,” Amabile and Kramer recently wrote for The Post’s On Leadership blog.