Mortgage company and EBR vanished $3k out of my escrow account

1st time homeowner, bought the house 3 years ago at 3.8%. No complaints with the mortgage product as it was wholly unique and precisely tailored to my financial situation and allowed me to buy the house in the first place. My mortgage (Regions) went up each year, but I assumed it was solely because of homeowners insurance increases which haven't been small.

So when I received my 3rd escrow statement last week, I noticed that my mortgage payment went down $150 despite homeowners again going up $700 and county taxes remaining about the same. Alarm bells started ringing and I went back and checked my past statements, now armed with my 3rd statement as context to compare the 1st and 2nd.



1st year Escrow statement (among other items of course):
--------------------------------------
> April 2022, beginning of statement
> December 2022, line item for $3k tax taken out and accounted for.
> March 2022, ending escrow balance of -$300 and no other line items

(everything OK up to this point I suppose)


2nd year Escrow statement:
--------------------------------------
> beginning balance listed at -$3350, with no explanation. (WTF?)
> December 2023, 2nd year county tax taken out


Basically $3k vanished out of my escrow account in between my first two statements with no explanation that I could see.



After speaking with multiple reps and supervisors for 45 minutes and getting all kinds of obviously wrong explanations about why the ending and beginning balances didn't match and why my actual escrow balance was -$4500 off of projected at one point, a supervisor finally found (in their internal files, not the statements provided to me) that county tax of ~$3k was paid twice my first year due to issues with EBR and their parcel #s, in December of 2022 and March of 2023, and one was supposed to be refunded but never was.

As a result, and because escrow is self-correcting, I've been paying more than I should've towards my mortgage, about $3k more, over the last couple years. $3k might not mean a lot to some of you, but it would've meant a lot to me.

a) The great news is that my mortgage payment isn't as high as I thought it would be, and I have a $3000 check coming my way that I wasn't expecting.

b) The shitty news is that, in the last two years, I've helped pay for my wedding, had things break in the house that I would've liked to fix, and I've made a 74% return since March of 2023 on the pennies that I do have in my investment account. If I had put that $3k into my holdings, it would be over $5000 now.

...


After a week of not hearing back from my mortgage company, I just got off the phone with a supervisor and posed him these questions over the course of 30 minutes...

1. Why was their no line item for that 2nd tax payment?

2. What the frick is happening during my escrow analysis? Why did it take me, a first time homeowner, to realize that something is off 2 escrow statements later and not the bank? Shouldn't my mortgage professional have caught this two years ago when my account was all-of-a-sudden at -$3300 and $4500 lower than projected? Or this most recent statement when my mortgage payment went down despite much higher hazard (because I was already paying far more than I should)? Why was this not caught sooner?

3. Would this have ever been caught if I hadn't brought it up? Escrow is self correcting, and I had about made up the shortage over the last couple years. Would anyone have ever noticed if I hadn't gone digging?

4. On that note, escrow statements can be very confusing, especially if you're looking at your first one. What's stopping a lender from taking advantage of 1st time homeowners and doing this on purpose, but throwing their hands up when they get caught (if they even do), and claiming it was an accident?

5. If Regions mortgage did their job, it would've been caught sooner. I pay ~4% interest to them. Why shouldn't I be entitled to at least ~4% interest on the extra $3000 that I scraped together and paid over 2 years and haven't had access?


I was polite as possible while being stern, but I don't think the Regions supervisor enjoyed my call and, while he was able to offer some good context, he didn't have concrete answers for many of these. After questioning if might be a potential RESPA violation, it has since been escalated again to a "specialist" who's supposed to reach out to me in the next few days.


Speaking of which, my biggest question to the money board is, aside from the $3000 check coming in the mail...

Is this a potential RESPA escrow violation? And am I deserving of something more than just the lump-sum check, whatever little it may be? I'm sure it's small potatoes, but what does recourse for these situations usually look like? I'm in totally unfamiliar territory here.



__________________________________




TLDR
- Mortgage company paid county tax twice, but didn't list it on escrow statements.
- EBR didn't refund, and is now in the process of sorting it out because I, not Regions, raised the alarm.
- No one from mortgage company caught inconsistencies at any point with ample opportunity to do so over multiple years.
> Therefore, I incrementally paid $3000 extra towards my escrow the past 2 years when I really wish I had access to that money to use it for something productive.