JPMorgan Chase sent home packing its former head of home lending, ending an era the bank would rather forget.  David Lowman, who joined JPMorgan from Citigroup in 2006, ran the business area that racked up billions in losses on mortgages and burdened the bank with litigation over foreclosures. 

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon personally removed Lowman from his position in February, and moved his top aide Bisignano into the company's retail banking unit to fix its mortgage business. 

Disorganized.   During Lowman's tenure, the unit was so disorganized that the bank seized homes of at least 33 U.S. military servicemen on active duty, violating federal law and prompting Dimon to apologize at the company's annual shareholder meeting.  The bank has said it is forgiving those loans. The bank also picked up bad mortgage assets through its acquisitions of Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual.

Chastised During Testimony.   Lowman appeared before congressional committees last year where he was chastised for his division's refusal to cooperate with borrowers and modify mortgages.  Lowman said in a June 2010 hearing that the bank was understaffed, but was adding employees to work on problematic mortgages.  In a hearing in November, Lowman acknowledged mistakes in foreclosure paperwork and said the bank was cleaning up errors.

JPMorgan and other large banks are in negotiations with the Department of Justice and state attorneys general to settle probes into mistakes in foreclosures.  All told, the bank recorded $1.1 billion in litigation expenses in the first quarter, primarily because of mortgage-related claims.  It also marked down the value of its mortgage-servicing contracts by $1.1 billion because of increased costs and boo ked $1.1 billion of expenses for losses on its residential real estate portfolio.   [Reuters, 6/14/11]