Waste Of The Day: Nevada Sitting On $91 Million Meant To Help Homeowners

Authored by Adam Andrzejewski via RealClear Wire,

While homeowners in Nevada receive foreclosure notices and risk losing their homes, the state has only used a small portion of the $120 million the U.S. Treasury Department allocated to help people avoid foreclosure.

Nevada Affordable Housing Assistance Corporation, a small nonprofit, gets the federal funds and is supposed to pay banks directly to bring mortgages current, ProPublica reported.

But its slow pace at enrolling people in need and paying those delinquent mortgages ranks Nevada 43rd among the states for getting money to homeowners.

At the end of the first quarter, Treasury reported that the nonprofit had distributed $17 million — less than 14% of the funds — and as of Aug. 15, according to NAHAC’s data, Nevada had distributed an additional $12 million.

A federal audit found that previous leadership at Nevada Affordable Housing Assistance Corporation “had squandered federal aid to homeowners caught up in the 2008 foreclosure crisis,” ProPublica reported. It’s unclear, other than new leadership, why the same organization would be entrusted to run a $120 million program.

The program continues to have issues, including making timely payments to banks, while homeowners continue to receive foreclosure notices on loans they thought were being paid.

One woman who got a few partial mortgage payments from the program, Shirley Geraci, said when she told the nonprofit that she was getting foreclosure notices, the organization was unable to tell her how much it had paid her bank and why the payment hadn’t been applied to her account, and it wouldn’t provide anything in writing.

Geraci and her daughter were unsure whether they’d even try to continue getting more aid.

The states are “flying by the seat of their pants” to run the program and “people are suffering,” she said.

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