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CENLAR IS THE MOST INCOMPETENT excuse for a company I have ever dealt with. We were with TB&W and as everyone else expressed were not even notified properly of the transfer of our mortgage - I have faxed tax bills and insurance bills to 5 different fax #'s per their useless customer service dept. All they do is give you the stall tactic through every conversation and then have the nerve to send me a statement indicating that insurance is required and that they will direct the insurance if I don't get it put in place.

!!!!!! I don't have insurance because they stole my money from my account or if I give them the benefit of the doubt - they don't have the brains to figure it all out!!!!!! Get someone in there that can service the accounts the correct way!!!!!

We were also told (via the news) that our taxes were likely not paid. Sure enough the same nightmare run-around with the taxes - as the County Tax assessor says...sorry...taxes are still due even though you already paid your money to your escrow. Oh, and by the way the property due taxes go up for auction within about 2-3 months of the due date and then a lien can be put against your house if your taxes are sold to an investor. Thankfully after many hours of calling, faxing and yelling...my taxes were paid, but the insurance is still clearly a major issue!

If it wasn't for the local news channel, we wouldn't have necessarily even realized our taxes weren't paid until it was too late, because they also (coincidentally) stopped sending us the monthly statement that indicated what the status is of our escrow, etc.

I am tired of the runaround and am going to contact any dept. that could possibly resolve this issue. I have taken off of work 2 days to try to resolve this BS and I'm sick of it! Not sure if it's the States Attorney, Attorney General, News Channel, Better Business Bureau - I'm contacting them all - maybe somehow it will lead me in the proper direction.

When is the government going to step-in and stop these incompetent banking practices????

Any feedback as to a proper direction to resolve this issue would be appreciated - by me and I'm sure by many others.

Location: Chicago, Illinois

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Guest

QUESTIONS ABOUT TAX EXEMPT ,THEY DON'T KNOW ANYTHING.FAXED A COPY SAYING I WILL NOT OWE ANY TAXES IN 2016 STILL HAVEN'T ADJUSTED MY PAYMENT.LETTER CLEARLY SAYS I WILL OWE 0.CAN'T TALK TO THEM JUST FAX AND IT'S THE WRONG #

Guest

These are not the only problems with Cenlar. We recently had severe damage to our roof and siding after a major hail storm in May. Our insurance carrier adjuster agreed and we were sent a check to cover the ACV portion of the loss, pending completion of the work. Because the loss was greater than $5,000, the insurance company included Cenlar as the mortgage holder as a payee on the check. I contacted Cenlar's Insurance Claims Department and they sent me the procedure for endorsing the check.

They want us to endorse the check BEFORE we send it to them along with a signed intent to repair. They also want copies of the work estimate, a signed Conditional Waiver of Lien and a W-9 Taxpayer Identification Form from the contractor(s).

Sears Home Improvement offered us the best value, so we had them do the work (which was completed in early July). They would not provide taxpayer identification, and they would not sign a conditional waiver. "The work is already paid for," I was told, "There is no lien." Which, of course is true.

So, I contacted Cenlar and told them I would send the check without our endorsement, along with a copy of the paid receipts and the certificate of completion. I was promptly told that the check would be returned if it was not endorsed by us. I told him that the work was done and that I need those funds to pay the loans. His reply: "Can I help you with anything else today?"

Does anyone see any problem with sending a fully endorsed check to a company with Cenlar's track record? Does anyone foresee potential fraud, or at best mismanagement of funds?

Meanwhile, interest is accruing on the financing which should not have occurred if these funds were properly endorsed by them.

Does anyone have someone I can contact to help with this impasse?

Guest

I have the SAME ISSUE with CENLAR. They have been Delinquint on my taxes TWICE now.

Every time I call in they say they are "Researching".

Three weeks to research what took me 10 minutes to call the local treasurer to get an answer.

What the *** CENLAR. You suck!

Guest

I have the SAME ISSUE with CENLAR. They have been Delinquint on my taxes TWICE now.

Every time I call in they say they are "Researching".

Three weeks to research what took me 10 minutes to call the local treasurer to get an answer.

What the *** CENLAR. You suck!

Guest

Oh yes, it's grand working with CENLAR!!!!

After writing the first complaint, I then found out that not only did they have my Taxes and Insurance messed up and LATE, but they also have my payment amount completely wrong and my escrow amount a disaster.

They have indicated that my escrow is $1500 short. After many hours of arguing with them, I finally was told that they request two months escrow in advance, even though TB&W didn't require a two month cushion. Multiply that times the number of customers they have and just imagine how much of our money they have to make money off of.

They send out a letter telling me it's short, but don't explain why it's short - because THEY CHANGED THE RULES IN THE MIDDLE OF THE GAME!!!! I would think a simple explanation as to WHY the escrow was short would be a good idea to include in the letter, but NO, THAT WOULD MAKE TOO MUCH SENSE - so hours of calling and going around in circles over numbers not matching up - finally brought out the true reason why THEY SAY the escrow is now short...because THEY CHANGED THE POLICY!

USELESS!!!!!!!!

I would suggest if you are still having problems to try going to the OCC website. I believe it will lead you to be able to formally make a complaint. It will identify which info applies to you and then send you a page or two down the link, but eventually I saw that it had a form to fill out to make an official complaint. Unfortunately, it looked like it was a long process. That was the next step I was going to take if I didn't get the numbers to calculate out to make any sense.

Also wanted to mention:

If you have been able to get your insurance paid by them through arguing back and forth - be aware that they likely paid them this one time, but since the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing at CENLAR, the message to put it in your records to be paid next year, probably didn't happen. When I called over the escrow/payment problems I was having, part of the issue was also that they didn't have it in the file that they are responsible for paying taxes (even though they just recently paid them)!!!!! The department that agreed to pay the insurance (LATE - I might add) did not put it in the system to be paid in the future.

Good Luck!!!!!!

Guest

I hated TB&W and thought they were the worse that there could be; that is, until Cenlar got my loan. And, of course, my escrow monies are gone and Cenlar claims they don't know why.

I tried to refinance, but with the housing market so down, my house value is below what I owe. And trying to get through to Cenlar is a futile effort. Do they ever answer their phone or respond to an e-mail???

I agree--class action. I'll gladly join in.

Guest

Here is the letter I sent to the BBB,FTC,HUD,FDIC,Attorney General and many others. Has anyone had any luck with this ***?

On August 18th 2009 my wife and I discovered that our loan had been taken over by รขโ‚ฌล“CENLAR: Central Loan Administration & Reportingรขโ‚ฌย as Taylor Bean and Whitaker, our previous loan provider, had been indicted for fraud and gone out of business. At that time we had already made the monthly payment due to TB&W which Cenlar had apparantly failed to credit to my account. There have been SEVERAL issues with the servicing of my loan to date (which will be outlined later in this text) to which I have not been able to receive a resolution from Cenlar.

First, as mentioned above we made a payment for $1,435.05 to TB&W on August 1st which just recently, as of this writting, had been credited to my account, much much later than it should have been. In a panic to keep my mortgage current I attempted to contact Cenlar at that time via phone at different times during the morning, noon, and night to no avail. The phone numbers provided on the Cenlar website were useless as they were repeatedly not able to take our calls due to high call volume. In addition I attempted to contact Cenlar via email and regular post with the same outcome. Finally around October they did credit my account for the missing payment but I still have had no contact from the company via phone or email in this regard.

Second and most alarming, while looking online at my loan information with Cenlar I noticed that a portion of my payment submissions ($172.67) were being allocated to an accounting line item titled รขโ‚ฌล“Escrow Advance Refund Requestรขโ‚ฌย. I wrote Cenlar an email at that time to which I received a letter and an escrow statement advising that my escrow account had been negative when they had taken over the account from TB&W. As a complete contradiction the TB&W statement for July states a residual balance in my escrow account for $249.97 as of July 8th. I can only assume that TB&W had misappropriated the funds from my escrow account in their fraudulent activity as I can think of no other way that my escrow account would be negative as no tax or insurance would have been due at that time. Upon loan origination with TB&W I initially funded the escrow account in advance and have always paid an allocation to it with my monthly payment described by the terms of my loan. I have NEVER missed a payment and have NEVER paid a late fee of any kind to either TB&W or Cenlar, so if the balance is negative the funds must have been removed by TB&W or Cenlar at some point or stolen by Cenlar. Unfortunately, I am not able to contact anyone from TB&W in this regards as they are currently being indicted for fraud and not taking customer service calls or providing past statements. To date Cenlar has stolen a total of $872.65 via this fradulent scheme and every month they systematically accumulate an additional $172.67. I am at no fault if TB&W stole our escrow money nor did I chose (or would I chose) to transfer my loan to Cenlar yet I am clearly being victimized here as a result.

Third, I made my December payment in the amount of $1,435.05 as I always do yet received a letter from Cenlar on December 7th 2009 advising the following: รขโ‚ฌล“Please be advised that your December payment was $76.49 less that the correct payment amount. รขโ‚ฌย and further advised รขโ‚ฌล“We cannot accept short payments and will return any short payments we receiveรขโ‚ฌย. Please know that to date I have not received ANY correspondence advising that my monthly payment had changed or a letter explaining why it would have changed. I canรขโ‚ฌโ„ขt imagine why my payment would have changed as we have a fixed rate loan, fixed for the life of the loan at 5.75%. The only variable I can imagine is that my taxes or insurance may have gone up. However, I know for a fact that my annual taxes have actually been reduced due to my plumetting property value and I have received no correspondence from my insurance company advising of a rate increase. As a result I again attempted to contact Cenlar with the intent to cancel my escrow account entirely to prevent the fraudulent activity from occuring. Finally my wife did get hold of an individual from Cenlar who advised that in order to cancel our escrow account we would need to contact our insurance company and our county treasury department and have them each send a letter to Cenlar advising that we intended to take over responsibility. Upon contacting the Maricopa County Treasury office to make this ridiculous request, which is far outside of the scope of their responsibility, and being told, as expected, that they do not offer this service my wife again contacted Cenlar. During this contact the Cenlar associate advised my wife that she had been misinformed by the previous associate (also from Cenlar) and that we simply needed to fax a request to their research department and that they would review it within 10-16 weeks (at their convenience) and then let us know if they would รขโ‚ฌล“allowรขโ‚ฌย us to cancel our escrow account with them. In addition to this information the associate advised that we would need to satisfy the negative balance (which they fabricated for their benefit) in the equity account before cancelling it. So in addition to stealing our money Cenlar intends to accumulate all of the stolen funds before allowing us to escape from their escrow scam. On a third attempt to contact Cenlar we were again unsuccessful.

I request immediate action and the reconciliation of our escrow account ON THEIR END. I do not simply want a convoluted copy of a statement mailed to us. It is their responsibility to review and rectify any accounting errors they have caused. Failure to do so is fraud and their unwillingness to help us review our account for a potential accounting problem is proof that they are an unsavory fly by night company, we have seen this several times in the news in regards to Wallstreet bankers like Madoff. In addition I need them to IMMEDIATELY cancel our impound account and forward correspondence via certified letter advising that the maintenance on the account has been completed in a reasonable time, before my next payment is due. The issue is that if we wanted to pay the defeceit (which I DO NOT) it changes every time I make a standard payment due to their accounting line item. Their quoted time of 10-16 weeks is inadequate and quite convenient as several payments would have been made in that time further convoluting the account. Truly I have no patience for this. I am not a subprime bottom feeder and I am furious that I am being treated like one. As mentioned above I have never missed a mortgage payment, EVER, and there is a 0% chance of me ever missing one. It is not by my choice nor is it an accurate reflection on my payment habits or credit history that my loan has ended up being serviced by loan sharks and bookies and honestly I am very embarassed to be associated with such an organization.

Guest

So I'm not alone. Cenlar sent my property tax to a wrong address in Oct..

In Nov. I was informed by my tax dept. that my tax was not paid. Since then I keep calling them, faxing docs but so far they still haven't done anything.

The end of the year is coming and my tax is due soon, I really don't know how to make them pay my tax with MY money! So sick of this company...TB&W seems much better.

Guest

Cenlar paid someone else's taxes from our escrow account - our taxes remain unpaid. They've supposedly been researching it, and were to have a resolution by yesterday - of course no contact and no resolution.

We lost money when TBW's check for our escrow balance bounced, I'm not prepared to lose more on these birds. Called NJ's AG's office, she said they're regulated by Office of Thrift Supervisors (Fed). Same birds who were supposed to be overseeing AIG, right? But I've started that process.

Also filed complaint with NJ's BBB, although they're already ranked D- from them and apparently ignoring complaints. Next stop is my Congressman.

Guest

I have been on the phone with Cenlar 10 times in 8 weeks trying to have them pay my school taxes (PA). All I get is the run-around and BS.

I have now spoke twice with Tiera who lacks the basic ability to carry on a conversation.

I believe that this is some kind of scam to keep the funds longer. Maybe they have the funds invested.

Maybe they lost the investment. Not sure.

Guest

I am in the same boat as all of you. Poor notification that the loan was sold; checks sent and then cashed AFTER the due date, thereby charging "late fees"; never get a response via phone or email; raising my house payment by$75 per month - they state due to "tax increases" - my taxes increased $34 PER YEAR.

I contacted my mortgage "buddy" -he too thinks that Cenlar is artificially inflating the escrow accounts which gives Cenlar more money to play with without incurring finance charges or having to pay taxes. Your escrow account can only be "padded" by 1/6th of your annual escrow charges - for example, if your escrow charges (taxes, insurance) equal $1800 per year, the account can only be padded by $300. My buddy also suggested writing to HUD as they are responsible for FHA funds and Cenlar does deal with FHA loans. I went to www.hud.gov and looked under "Inspector General" and filed the complaint online. If enough people notify HUD, Hud will shut these people down.

I am refinancing my mortgage SOLEy to get away from Cenlar - it is costimg me $6000 to refi, but worth every penny.

I hope you all will file your complaints with HUD asap

Guest

This company is the worst company I have ever dealt with...They say they have paid my taxes to the county and they have not done it..They have lied to me..When I call the county, they say that Cenlar said they would pay them last week but did not..Talk about incompetent..And for those of you who say "chill out" apparently it's not your money that they are messing with so be quiet.

Lorna T Ldv

I want in if anyone begins a class action suit! I have been trying to refinance with TB&W then was told it was tranfer along with my loan to Cenlar.

They also paid my home insurance I do not even have my mortgage set up for that I pay my insurance and taxes myself. Called Cenlar after waiting 30 minutes for someone to answer the call who was in India, they had applied my next month payment to principal rather than my monthly payment too! My credit cards now are at 30% never had a late payment on home or credit cards. They said they would correct but it would take at least a week or more.

Asked them about my refinancing? Customer Service Rep. asked me to call back in a month and they would flag my account. Today I received a letter in the mail that CENLAR Does not orginate loans and cannot assist with refinance.

I have wasted months and months on this! Stated in the letter is to goo to making home affordable.gov, I contacted a number closet to my home, they want me to come in for consuling on my finances, then they maybe able to tell me who can help me refinance my home. What a scam from the goverment! Has anyone really had help with refinancing a Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac home for a lower interest rate?

I did not even know TB&W sold my loan to Freddie Mac. I thought it was TB&W until this happened now where do I go?

Guest

They haven't paid my taxes either. I did get a response to an email today. They suggested I mail the tax bill plus penalties to their Utah office. You know once I got hold of their customer service email account number I sent them an image of my tax bill and told them I already mailed, faxed and kissed the dog gong tax bill, now pay it!

The email indicated they would pay it within 72 hours of receiving. You gotta like email, it's better than registered mail because I have a time stamp and receipt now. I sent the tax bill registered mail and still don't have a receipt after 2 months.

I don't know what to suggest to you. I've contacted the PA Department of Banking, the Better Business Bureau, and the Federal Trade Commission with no response from any of them to date.

By the way, if you get a chance take a look at your Cenlar account on line. Mine is reporting to the credit bureaus that I'm more than 30 days late on my payments. all my credit card companies need to do is get a whifffff of that and I'll be in the 25+% credit card bracket. Cenlar posted my last payment to principal rather than to my payment, that coupled with the frozen accelerator program payments and they're killing me.

I'm doing a refinance just to get away from them.

Also, check you LTV (Loan to value). Cenlar based the calculations based on the the original finance price, NOT the actual value of own homes. I don't think that is appropriate. I even sent them a new appraisal to prove I have the value to end the MI insurance.

They are a total waste.

Where are the feds. when they are needed.

Good grief!

Class action suit!

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