Dear Mr. Chairman:
At the outset of the 112th Congress, the Oversight Committee unanimously adopted an oversight plan that included a proposal I offered to “examine the foreclosure crisis including wrongful foreclosures and other abuses by mortgage servicing companies." Although the Committee has taken some preliminary steps to examine these issues, to date it has failed to conduct a full, fair, or thorough investigation of the widespread abuses committed by mortgage servicing companies against American families, particularly military servicemembers.
In its first full year of investigations this Congress, the Committee held 118 hearings with 342 witnesses, but not a single bank executive was called to testify on the foreclosure crisis, despite multiple requests from me and other Committee Members. In addition, in 2011, the Committee issued more than 200 detailed document requests and subpoenas, but none sought documents relating to wrongful foreclosures or abusive lending practices. The only exception was a document request you and I sent jointly to Bank of America, but it has not produced a single responsive document, and the Committee has taken no action to compel production.
Rather than using its substantial investigative powers to protect American consumers from the abuses of banks, the Committee has focused instead on attacking the new agency created by Congress to protect these same consumers. Tomorrow, the Committee will hold its third hearing with officials from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). In addition, the Committee has received hundreds of pages of documents in response to a detailed document request you sent in June 2011, as well as numerous questions for the record after Committee hearings, regarding allegations that CFPB acted outside its authority in providing advice during negotiations toward a possible settlement with mortgage servicing companies relating to foreclosure abuses.
