The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) has made it easier for struggling borrowers to complete an application for mortgage help all by themselves: no outside -- and expensive -- assistance necessary.

The FHFA, in conjunction with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two of the secondary mortgage market entities it supervises, has implemented a new Mortgage Assistance Application, or MAAp, to implement some lessons learned during the housing crisis. One of the most important lessons is “ensuring that the application process is straightforward and as easy to navigate as possible,” the FHFA said in a press release.

The new MAAp form gives equal weight to five principles -- accessibility, affordability, accountability, sustainability and transparency -- and is designed to coincide with the new Flex Modification program implemented last fall by Fannie and Freddie. (Flex Mod itself replaced the Home Affordable Modification Program.) Under Flex Mod, borrowers seeking help can get their payments reduced by as much as 20 percent. They can also have any past-due amount added to their unpaid balance and have their payments recalculated over a new loan term.

Of course, the first rule for financially strapped homeowners is to call your servicer: the company that collects your payments. Even if you’re not yet late with a payment, but think you might miss one soon, call to find out if you are eligible for help under their proprietary programs.

If they can’t or won’t help, the next step is to complete the new MAAp. The earlier you apply, the greater the payment relief you may receive, according to Fannie Mae.

The new, simpler form incorporates feedback from borrowers and the mortgage business, and is more user-friendly than its predecessors. For example, it allows borrowers to determine how they will be contacted, and terms have been revised and clarified. And for the first time, it includes information on housing counseling services, resources for borrowers with limited proficiency in English, and a list of steps that will follow.

It also reduces the amount of support documentation required to show the applicant’s hardship and income. The requirement that borrowers must submit IRS form 4506-T to document their earnings is removed, except in limited circumstances. Applicants must now submit either their two most recent pay stubs or bank statements.

Prior to being 90 days delinquent, a borrower experiencing financial challenges can fill out the MAAp and submit it to their servicer. The servicer will then evaluate the borrower for foreclosure alternatives and explore the options, which can include a repayment plan, forbearance, modification, short-sale or deed-in-lieu of foreclosure.

Unfortunately, there will always be those who try to scam homeowners desperately searching for help to avoid foreclosure. Federal authorities continue to come down hard on these outfits. Just last month, thanks to the Federal Trade Commission, a federal court halted an illegal scheme in which consumers were charged $3,900 in unlawful advance fees and $650 in monthly installments in exchange for the promise of “legal assistance.”

This case, one of many in recent years, contains a couple lessons for consumers:

1. The government will never contact you on this issue by mail, phone, text or email unless you contact an agency yourself. And when Uncle Sam does get back to you, all correspondence will have a case number.

2. Beware of any offers that require you to pay upfront for help. Under the FTC’s Mortgage Assistance Relief Services Rule, it is illegal for a company to collect any fees until you have actually received, and accepted, an offer of relief from your lender. You don’t have to pay until the company gets you the results you want.

Among other things, the FTC went after the entities named below for using doctored government logos, claiming special relationships with particular lenders, and unlawfully telling consumers not to pay their mortgages or communicate with their lenders.

As noted above, you can and should talk to your servicer, the sooner the better. You don’t need an intermediary. Never, ever stop paying whatever you can on your mortgage, and never stop communicating with your lender. Doing so can make the problem worse by getting you further behind on payments, damaging your credit and even causing you to fall into foreclosure.

In many instances, the FTC alleged, consumers paid hundreds or thousands of dollars only to learn that the defendants had not obtained the promised loan modifications, and in some cases, had never even contacted any lenders. Many people incurred substantial interest charges and other penalties for paying the defendants instead of their mortgage payments, and some lost their homes to foreclosure.

Some groups falsely claimed a 98-100 percent success rate, and that they could cut people’s mortgage rates in half. Nobody, but nobody, has a success rate that high, and nobody’s rate will be cut in half. If you encounter anyone who says that, head for the door.

Again, the FTC has shut down many types of mortgage modification scams, but it hasn’t stopped them all -- so homeowner beware.

The latest to come under the agency’s sword include: Preferred Law PLLC; Consumer Defense LLC in Nevada; Consumer Defense LLC in Utah; Consumer Link Inc.; American Home Loan Counselors; American Home Loans LLC; Consumer Defense Group LLC, formerly known as Modification Review Board LLC; Brown Legal Inc.; AM Property Management LLC; FMG Partners LLC; Zinly LLC; Jonathan P. Hanley; Benjamin R. Horton; and Sandra X. Hanley.

Last year’s two monster hurricanes aside, homeowners were making their mortgage payments at a better clip in 2017 than in any year in nearly two decades. But there are indications that borrower fraud and lender slip-ups could portend an increase in late payments, and possibly even foreclosures.

Fortunately, the upward trend in defective home loans is not likely to impact borrowers -- at least not directly, says Phil McCall, president of ACES Risk Management (ARMCO), which offers quality control services to lenders. But bad loans could have devastating consequences for mortgage producers, who could be forced to buy them back from investors who purchased them on the secondary market.

Only the uptick in misrepresentation is likely to be troublesome for borrowers. It is a federal crime to tell so much as a little white lie on your mortgage application. Borrowers who exaggerate their incomes and employment, fail to disclose their liabilities or falsify documents are rarely prosecuted, but it can happen. The greater worry should be that lying on your loan application could get you approved for a loan you’re not actually able to pay back.

ARMCO’s quarterly post-closing review of more than 90,000 loans, selected at random, found a surprising increase in the rate of critical defects in last year’s second quarter. A “critical defect” is any problem with a loan that renders it uninsurable or ineligible for sale. The most common loan defect found by ARMCO’s audit was in the “borrower or loan eligibility” category, which refers to loans that didn’t meet the rules of the investors who bought them. Typically in these cases, the lender either has to fix the problem or buy back the loan.

If the lender has to repurchase the loan, the impact could ruin them, especially if they’ve made more than a few bad loans. Most lenders aren’t well capitalized -- in a constantly repeating cycle, they make mortgages, sell them and use the proceeds to make more loans. So they don’t have the scratch on hand to buy back too many rotten apples.

Issues with credit, or the lack thereof, were the second most common defect in ARMCO’s survey. This relates to borrowers who, between the date they’re approved for a loan and the day they close, open one or more new credit accounts. Perhaps they purchased a slew of furniture for the new house, or took out a loan on a new truck to move said furniture.

Whatever the case, opening new accounts could push your all-important debt-to-income (DTI) ratio beyond the investor’s parameters. To guard against that, lenders are supposed to run a new credit report a day or two before settlement. But sometimes they don’t, and the bad loan slips through the cracks.

However, investors almost always perform quality control reviews on their end. And when they see that the DTI ratio has been exceeded, the lender will probably have to take the loan back. “Investors were burned enough during the 2008 downturn,” says McCall.

Consumers are on the hook for the next-highest category of loan errors found by ARMCO: mistakes about income and employment. Some borrowers will stretch a bit when they report their earnings or bonuses. Maybe they won’t report business expenses or losses, or perhaps they’ll say the rent they take in from their investment properties is greater than it actually is. In some cases, the borrower doesn’t report that he has to make alimony payments or payments on an unrecorded mortgage, either of which counts as a debt.

“Any type of misrepresentation on the part of the consumer could come back to bite him,” says McCall.

Sometimes, it’s the lender who flubs up by using outdated documentation or an inaccurate income history. Or maybe they didn’t properly source a large deposit in the borrower’s bank account, or validate that a gift from Mom and Dad was truly a gift, not a loan. In these types of errors, it’s the lender, not the borrower, who could pay dearly.

ARMCO isn’t the only firm that is finding a higher incidence of loan mistakes -- so has title insurer First American. Overall, First American’s defect index in December was down 18.6 percent from its high point four years ago. But it is up 20.3 percent from December a year ago. “Much of the elevated risk can be attributed to an increase in the share of purchase mortgage transactions, which tend to carry more risk,” reports the company’s chief economist, Mark Fleming.

And as mortgage rates rise, the share of purchase money loans will increase, “putting upward pressure on the overall risk of defect, fraud and misrepresentation,” says Fleming. “We have seen this before.”

But for now, home loans are performing admirably, according to Black Knight’s latest mortgage monitor.

While hurricanes Harvey and Irma significantly impacted loan performance, take them out of the equation and the national delinquency rate -- which covers 90 percent of the entire active mortgage universe -- was 11 percent below long-term norms in December, Black Knight found. Also, the number of seriously delinquent loans (90 days or more past due) was down 14 percent.

Better yet, 2017 was “a record-setting year” in terms of foreclosure activity, says Black Knight’s chief economist, Ben Graboske. Fewer than 650,000 loans started the foreclosure process last year, which is the fewest in any year since 2000.

#MeToo, say as many as 3 out of 4 women in the mortgage business.

That’s how many say they’ve experienced sexual harassment as defined by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

Claire Weber, chief operating officer of FormFree -- a technology company that provides verification of borrower assets, employment and income -- is one of them. She says she has been assessed and devalued by men who assume her goal is to be physically pleasing in a professional setting.

“Frank, unwarranted, unrelated assessments of my appearance and the fit of my clothing in the middle of a serious business conversation is one of the milder examples that I can cite,” Weber says.

She has experienced such poor behavior on numerous occasions. So she knew instinctively what could happen to a new female employee, just five months out of college, at the Mortgage Banker Association’s (MBA) convention last fall in Denver.

It “was a topic I could not overlook, both as a female professional in this industry and as an executive at our company,” she says. So over lunch with her rookie worker, Weber got right to the point:

“At this conference, one or more of the following will happen: You will be spoken to inappropriately, looked at inappropriately, touched inappropriately, have comments about your appearance or clothing made, have inappropriate invitations extended to you,” she warned. “One way or another, you will be treated as a sexual object instead of a business professional.”

Sure enough, within a few hours of the opening bell, Weber recalls, “one of the very things I had warned her of took place right before my eyes.” She quickly interrupted the unwanted interaction and escorted the powerful man back to his male colleagues.

“Despite the fact that I have encountered this so many times myself, and despite the fact that I was prepared and had prepared her, I felt shocked,” Weber says.

Scenes like this seem to play out just as often in the mortgage business as they do in the worlds of entertainment, politics, the media and sports. “It is an open secret that the mortgage industry harbors a subculture of male privilege and adolescent impulse that repulses female professionals,” says Weber.

According to a poll by the MBA’s mPower platform for female members, 3 out of 4 of the approximately 260 respondents said they had experienced at least one incident of sexual harassment.

The most frequent incidents happened in the office, and the most frequent behavior was inappropriate comments. But less than 1 in 10 reported the offending remarks to human resources, and just 1 in 5 ever mentioned them to someone in the chain of command who could address the poor behavior. Sound familiar?

The survey was not scientific, nor can the results be seen as indicative of the broader population, says Marcia Davies, chief operating officer at the MBA. Rather, mPower intends to use the data to start a conversation among its members about workplace sexual harassment.

“The women in mPower have been eager to discuss the issue head-on,” Davies says.

Some people maintain that they don’t know exactly what sexual harassment is, just that they “know it when they see it.” But the federal government’s definition is quite explicit. The EEOC defines it as: “unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature.”

Whether such conduct expresses itself as open leering and suggestiveness, or the subtler practices of minimization and exclusion, says Weber, “there is a vestigial fraternity of poorly evolved males for which women have developed a keen sense, and aversion.”

Other than perhaps a little flirting, Rosalie Berg says she has been the target of improper and unwanted sexual advances twice in the 15 years since she opened Strategic Vantage, one of the top marketing and advertising companies in the mortgage field. Both incidents were instigated by “very well-known, very powerful CEOs, who were probably used to getting what they want,” she recalls.

In one case, she was asked to continue a business conversation in the “gentleman’s” hotel room. Twice he implored her to join him in his room, and twice she said “no.” After that, it never came up again, Berg says. “When men leave home, many feel like they never had a wedding ring on.”

As Berg sees it, the way a women deals with harassment is paramount. “How you handle it defines who you are,” she says. “In my case, I felt empowered enough that if I lose business, so what? At least I still feel good about myself.”

As the MBA survey pointed out, many women aren’t in that strong of a position. And many simply don’t know how to handle it when men come on to them in a business setting.

Davies of the MBA says that, based on mPower’s poll, “it is clear that many women in our industry have to put significant effort into dealing with workplace sexual harassment.”

But, she adds, “the business does not need a scientific survey to estimate how many women (this has to affect) before we start to take action, because one is too many.”