Errors in Treasury's "Loan Modification Report" released yesterday

[Godhumor]

Actual full report is at

edited to correct url: http://www.financialstability.gov/docs/MHA%20Public%20121009%20Final.pdf

Too long didn't read version: The report actually overestimates the number of people currently being helped. The report says 24% of eligible are active when in fact it is 22%.

Anyway, I did some number crunching, and it looks like whomever put this together has some spreadsheet errors.

The two I found:

- Treasury lists the total number of permanent modifications at 31,382. The actual number is 31,211--the total double counts the 171 perm. mods from the "Other SPA Servicers" row (page 4 of the report)

- The total for "Active Trials + Permanents as Share of Eligible 60+ Day Delinquencies" is listed as 24%, which is also wrong. The analyst actually summed Permanent Mods + All HAMP Trials, which effectively double counts permanent mods and adds in trials that are no longer active. What makes this odd is that this error was only made for the Total row (i.e. each individual servicer row was summed correctly). Using the correct total for permanent modifications (31,211) and the correct formula shows that the correct total for "Active + Permanent as Share of Eligible" is 22% not 24%.

I can't believe these weren't caught before being published.

[Godhumor]

1. I'm going to bump this, as I think it is important to the foreclosure relief discussion n/t

[galileoreloaded]

2. Look man, you are kind of making our guy and his people look bad here...

maybe you should delete this post, rethink this a little, and maybe just bury it. We need team players, ya know. Lotta bad ju-ju out there right now, and we REALLY need everybody to pull the line here.

Thanks bro....

[Godhumor]

4. I actually really like Obama, but someone in the treasury screwed this up

Elementary fact checking has to happen before a report like this is released to the public.

[galileoreloaded]

5. I know. It was tounge in cheek. I totally agree...

I was just commenting on the discord I have seen in the last couple days. Why do we give conservatives the tools to bash our brains in with???

[WhiteTara]

3. they didn't expect a fact checker?

:rofl: these guys think that NO ONE will actually be curious enough to look at the things, so why bother to make sure they're correct. That's why faux can make pie charts equal more than 100.