The U.S. government is getting dubious information about subprime mortgages from the banking industry, the comptroller of the currency said.

John Duggan said regulators need accurate information on how many borrowers are being assisted and how many are facing foreclosure, The Washington Post reported.

As comptroller, Duggan is in charge of the agency that oversees national banks. The government is attempting to gauge the success of a program to help subprime borrowers keep their homes.

Virtually none of the data had been subjected to a rigorous process to check for consistency and completeness -- they were typically responses to surveys that produced aggregate, unverified results from individual firms, Dugan said in a speech Wednesday. That lack of loan-level validation raised real questions about the precision of the data, at least for our supervisory purposes.

Copyright 2008 by United Press International


Publication date: 13 June 2008   

Source: UPI-1-20080613-00422500-bc-us-mortgages.xml

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