The Federal Trade Commission announced Monday that two Countrywide mortgage servicing companies had agreed to pay $108 million to settle charges that they collected excessive fees from financially troubled homeowners, according to an article today at nytimes.com by Edward Wyatt.

"The $108 million payment is one of the largest overall judgments in the commission's history and resolves its largest mortgage servicing case. The money will go to more than 200,000 homeowners whose loans were serviced by Countrywide before July 2008, when it was acquired by Bank of America," the article stated.

"Jon Leibowitz, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, said that Countrywide's loan servicing operation charged excessive fees to homeowners who were behind on their mortgage payments," the article continued, "in some cases asserting that customers were in default when they were not. The fees, which were billed as the cost of services like property inspections and lawn mowing, were grossly inflated after Countrywide created subsidiaries to hire vendors to supply the services, increasing the cost several-fold in the process, the commission said. In addition, the commission said that Countrywide at times imposed a new round of fees on homeowners who had recently emerged from bankruptcy protection, sometimes threatening the consumers with a new foreclosure."

The settlement represents the agency's estimate of consumer losses, but does not include a penalty, which the article said the commission is not allowed to impose. The settlement, it added, "bars Countrywide from making false representations about amounts owed by homeowners, from charging fees for services that are not authorized by loan agreements, and from charging unreasonable amounts for work. In addition, the settlement requires Countrywide to establish internal procedures and an independent third party to verify that bills and claims filed in bankruptcy court are valid."