Government Accountability Office Study Looks at Defaults: 'How many good things have you gotten from somebody calling you on the phone?'.

WASHINGTON -- Three major trade groups are trying to convince at least one law maker to ask the Government Accountability Office to look into the causes of what is supposedly a marked increase in foreclosures.

Historically, the main reasons that families lose their homes are job loss, divorce or major illness. And the National Association of Mortgage Brokers, Mortgage Bankers Association and American Financial Services Association are betting that's still the case.

More importantly, they're hoping that abusive lending practices lead only to a small portion of repossessions by unscrupulous lenders.

Proponents of legislation at the national, state and local levels maintain that predatory lending is now a root cause of foreclosures "but they don't have any figures" to prove their case, NAMB president Harry Dinham said in a wide-ranging interview late last month with National Mortgage News.

The three groups "would like to see an impartial, third-party study" of the exact causes of foreclosure, and believe that the findings will quiet activists who want to place what brokers and lenders see as overly burdensome restrictions on their ability to serve borrowers, especially those with less-than-perfect credit.

"Certainly, abusive lending practices are the cause of some foreclosures," Mr. Dinham, a Dallas mortgage broker, said. "But they are not the big problem the consumer activists make them out to be."

NAMB also is taking its case against so-called trigger lists to Congress, and is looking for another white knight to carry the group's banner for a national predatory lending law that puts all lenders and brokers on an even footing.