Mimi Ash and her husband Robert loved taking weekend getaways to their mountain home in Truckee, Calif., to ski and relax. After Robert was stabbed to death in a road rage incident in 2005, Mimi brought his cremated remains to the ski house above Lake Tahoe in a wooden box with the words “Together Forever” inscribed on the lid.

But when Ash returned to the house in January 2009 for a weekend getaway, she found her husband’s remains gone, along with everything else in the house – family photos, furniture, her son’s ski medals.

The burglar was Bank of America. According to a lawsuit filed by Ash, a series of screw-ups by the bank forced her into foreclosure. As she negotiated to keep the house, the bank promised not to foreclose until her loan modification was decided.

Instead, Bank of America sent contractors to the house. They threw all its contents in the trash, including her husband’s cremated remains. And they changed the locks.

“It all ended up in landfills,” says Carlin Phillips, the Massachusetts attorney representing Ash in her lawsuit against the bank. “The loan servicing industry is out of control.”

The bank says it is working to figure out what happened.

“We take the allegations made by Ms. Ash very seriously and are thoroughly researching her claims,” Jumana Bauwens, a bank spokeswoman, told the New York Times.  “Bank of America will work with Ms. Ash and her counsel to determine the extent and cause of her claims and move toward an appropriate resolution of the case.”

Loan servicers are companies that handle the day-to-day administration of mortgage loans, including processing homeowners’ payments and paying dividends to investors. Many of the big loan servicers are owned by the biggest banks, including Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo.

Homeowners and their advocates have complained for years that servicers simply are not equipped to deal with loans when borrowers fall behind on payments, lacking the staff and the computer systems needed. Moreover, since servicers make more money the longer homes stay in foreclosure, the companies have few incentives to improve their systems so that homeowners can renegotiate their mortgages and keep their homes.

“The servicers seem to think there’s so many homes they need to foreclose on, who needs to follow the law?” Phillips says. “Well that’s not the way it works. Just because you have a lot of work to do doesn’t mean you get to disregard the law.”

In Ash’s case, after her husband died she paid $15,000 to Countrywide Financial to put the mortgage in her name. The company never responded to confirm that ownership was transferred, so Ash stopped making payments. Eventually she tried to modify the loan, but the company rarely responded to her e-mails and phone calls, according to the lawsuit.

The company sold the house in May 2008, but never told Ash. Next the company told her the sale would be rescinded and the house would be returned to her, but instead it sent contractors to empty the house. Bank of America bought Countrywide in February 2009.

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