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State attorneys general investigating foreclosure practices may begin meeting with lenders this week, less than a month after JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America suspended some home seizures.


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“We’ve had several conference calls with major lenders,’’ Colorado Attorney General John Suthers said, declining to specify which ones. “The banks want to sit down with the attorneys general. These meetings are being set up,’’ said Suthers.

All 50 states on Oct. 13 disclosed a coordinated inquiry into whether banks and loan servicers used false documents and signatures to justify hundreds of thousands of foreclosures. The probe came after JPMorgan and Ally Financial’s GMAC mortgage unit said they would stop repossessions in 23 states where courts supervise home seizures and Bank of America froze foreclosures nationwide.

At least 17 states are conducting separate investigations to determine whether state laws were broken. Each state has its own foreclosure laws, and the lender’s behavior may have differed from state to state, which makes reaching a global settlement difficult, said James Tierney, of Columbia Law School.

“These companies are going to act quickly to correct this,’’ Suthers said. He said it’s too early to speculate how the probes will end.

Yesterday, Wells Fargo admitted it made mistakes in paperwork for thousands of foreclosure cases and promised to fix them. The San Francisco bank plans to refile documents in 55,000 cases by mid-November; it said not all had errors.

Wells Fargo described the mistakes as technical and said it has no plans to halt the foreclosure process.

“We don’t believe that there are instances in which the foreclosures would not have occurred otherwise,’’ said Teri Schrettenbrunner, a spokeswoman.

Wells Fargo & Co.’s chief executive, John Stumpf, has declined to join Bank of America, Ally, and other banks in suspending foreclosures. This month, Stumpf said the bank is “confident that our practices, procedures, and documentation’’ are accurate.

The attorneys general won’t try to shut down all foreclosures, said Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna, but “foreclosures done improperly have to be corrected. It’s not permissible to violate state law to expedite a foreclosure.’’

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