Today's Least Surprising Headline. Sigh.

Today's New York Times carries a Shaila Dewan article with this headline: "Banks Fail to Comply With Parts of Mortgage Settlement, Report Says"

Who here is surprised? Not me.

According to the article, the court-appointment monitor of the settlement requirements found that Citibank, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase all failed several key tests, meaning that "some borrowers are still trapped in a tangle of red tape and errors as they try to save their homes from foreclosure."

(For those of you who -- like me -- have trouble remembering what this deal, reached early in 2012, involved, click here for a basic primer.)

Early on, there was a lot of skepticism as to how well the deal would really work out for consumers, as opposed to the banks. As the Times' Gretchen Morgenson wrote,

There’s no doubt that the banks are happy with this deal. You would be, too, if your bill for lying to courts and end-running the law came to less than $2,000 per loan file. 

(Click here for her full February 2012 analysis)

Looks like Gretchen was right.

While banks appear to have fulfilled "the bulk" of their financial obligations ahead of schedule, they're doing far less well on the improvement "in areas like ensuring that a loan was actually delinquent at the time that a foreclosure was initiated, and that the homeowner had been given accurate information in writing, and notifying homeowners of missing documents in their file in a timely manner."

Dewan noted that banks can be fined "up to $5 million if they do not improve their performance on a failed test." But what's $5 million to these guys?

Chump change.