Lawsuits detailing break-ins by banks keep surfacing and "in the wake of the scandal involving shoddy, sometimes illegal paperwork that has buffeted the nation's biggest banks in recent months, critics say these situations reinforce their claims that the foreclosure process is fundamentally flawed," according to a front-page article by Andrew Martin in today's edition of The New York Times.

Ira Rheingold, executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates, told The Times that "every day, smaller wrongs happen to people trying to save their homes: being charged the wrong amount of money, being wrongly denied a loan modification, being asked to hand over documents four or five times."

"Identifying the number of homeowners who were locked out illegally is difficult," the article noted, adding that "banks and their representatives insist" that situations like what happened to Mimi Ash in Truckee, California, who discovered that her home had been broken into and the locks and changed and her ski home had been cleared of her possessions by the Bank of America that had wrongfully foreclosed on her home without alerting her, "represent just a tiny percentage of foreclosures."

"Many of the incidents that have become public," the article continued, "appear to have been caused by confusion over whether a house is abandoned, in which case a bank may have the right to break in and make sure the property is secure. Some of the cases appear to be mistakes involving homeowners who were up to date on their mortgage - or had paid off their home - but who still became targets of a bank."

"In Florida," the article added, "contractors working for Chase Bank used a screwdriver to enter Debra Fischer's house in Punta Gorda and helped themselves to a laptop, an iPod, a cordless drill, six bottles of wine and a frosty beer, left half-empty on the counter, according to assertions in a lawsuit filed in August. Ms. Fisher was facing foreclosure, but Chase had not yet obtained a court order, her lawyer says. The break-in was discovered when a Canadian couple renting the house returned from the beach. Chase officials said such behavior by its contractors, if determined to be true, would be considered unacceptable and corrective action would be taken."

Banks and their contractors insist that the number of mistakes is minuscule given the hundreds of thousands of new foreclosure cases filed each month. Bank of America, for instance, says it works with third-party contractors to inspect and maintain more than one million properties each month and has enhanced its controls in the last year to prevent mistakes.