On Thursday, October 1, Bank of America announced that it was suspending all foreclosures in 23 states “where courts have jurisdiction over foreclosures”. (The bank later went on to suspend all foreclosures in the other 27 states too.)

On Monday, October 18, Bank of America announced that it will lift its foreclosure freeze in these 23 states next Monday:

The bank said the new documents will be used in 102,000 foreclosure actions in which judgment is pending in the 23 states.

So, in essentially 11 working days, Bank of America scrutinized the paperwork for all their foreclosure actions in 23 states, identified 102,000 cases where the paperwork was defective, and in 5 more working days, the bank will have spanking new documents ready for submission in these 102,000 cases?

It’s not clear how many foreclosure actions were pending in these 23 states, but if we’re charitable to the bank, only a small fraction must have had defective paperwork requiring new documents. So, in these 11 working days, the bank carefully scrutinized many more than 102,000 sets of paperwork.

A pretty impressive performance, all around. But, if that’s all the time and effort it was going to take, why did Bank of America just not bother to do it right in the first place? What about all those stories we’ve been hearing that the problems arose in the first place because the volume of foreclosures resulted in such a huge crush of paperwork that it simply wasn’t physically possible to scrutinize and verify everything?

Is it possible that diligent Bank of America employees still haven’t exactly carefully scrutinized the paperwork for all the pending foreclosure actions?