It’s a homeowner’s nightmare: contently living in a place without fear of foreclosure as the house is paid in full, only to have the bank pull the rug from under you and surprise you with an unexpected foreclosure.

This was what happened with Jason Gordensky, who paid in cash for his South Florida home in December. Seven months later, Bank of America foreclosed on the home with the court-ordered foreclosure on the 15^th of July. Gordensky, surprised, tried to straighten out the matter by contacting the lenders and lawyers involved.

Gordensky got nowhere for months until he decided to approach South Florida Sun Sentinel. The newspaper poked around and published the story. Now, Bank of America promises to straighten things out at their own cost.

Gordensky’s case is probably just one of the many who are victim to the foreclosure issue that’s haunting the real estate market nowadays: major financial institutions are halting foreclosures because of an admission that bank personnel don’t check document accuracy prior to filing a foreclosure notice. Banks say everything is mere technical error, that most foreclosures are on solid legal grounding and that paperwork errors are but results of the surge in defaults. But the issue is more than just a case of technicality and a lot of harm has been inflicted.

It used to be that every time a piece of property changes hand and a lien is filed, it needs to be recorded in a public deed room at the country house. But when the digital age came in, the process became archaic and in 1997, the Mortgage Electronic Registration System was created to computerize, centralize, and privatize deed records on some 60 mortgages. Though it saved the industry some $1 billion in fees, the local government lost tax revenue from transfers – and the public the access to accurate, accessible records of property ownership.

The shortcut has indeed led to bad record-keeping and it has caused a huge problem when the housing market crashed and many borrowers defaulted. Documents misidentifying mortgage holders and containing multiple omissions and errors were submitted during the height of foreclosures. And each leg of the foreclosure process contributed to the errors.

Not only do bank personnel not check the accuracy of documents, they also sometimes forged signatures. Even the notary publics lied about witnessing the signatures. Even the judges with civil dockets, because they have an overwhelming number o foreclosure cases, grant the foreclosures without inspecting the papers.

A close inspection would have brought the judges’ attention to the errors – just like in the case of Brooklyn Judge Arthur M. Schack. Schack said that in the past two years (which ended last year), he had to reject 46 of 104 foreclosure filings because the documents were full of error. Case in point: Deutsche Bank National Trust Co. filed to foreclose a home the mortgage to which was already sold to Goldman Sachs.

Gordensky’s case may be unique but it doesn’t mean he’s the only one hurt by the recent surge in foreclosure errors. The mortgage industry needs to look at reorganizing its record-keeping to avoid more errors from happening – before more people get their homes foreclosed on mere “technical error”.