Eliminating ‘He Said, She Said’ on Loan Modifications

WHEN it comes to home mortgage modifications, everyone seems to have a complaint.

Borrowers accuse mortgage servicers, which process the paperwork, of often losing important documents like pay stubs and bank statements. Servicers assert that the borrowers fail to submit certain papers and claim that they did, or submit the wrong ones.

Now, an industry group is rolling out an online portal that could eliminate these issues. Hope Now, a partnership of mortgage companies and nonprofit housing counselors, this month introduced “LoanPort,” which lets borrowers seeking a permanent mortgage modification upload digitized versions of their documents and track the progress of their application, with the help of a loan counselor.

“With this, there’s no ‘he said, she said’ element with lost documents,” said Faith Schwartz, the executive director of Hope Now, which is based in Washington.

But Howard Glaser, a principal of the Glaser Group, a consulting company in Washington, predicted that the initiative would be too small to have much impact on what he characterized as a broadly dysfunctional loan-modification effort.

“Marginal improvements are not going to have a significant impact on increasing loan modifications,” Mr. Glaser said.