I was one of those who was rejected for HAMP. After a 14-month application process I received a simple phone call saying - "sorry" and "you'll need to wait for the official letter to explain why your application was not accepted".

Basically they made a mistake in reading the application (I owned my own business at the time and they had trouble understanding their own questions). When I called them back to explain, the response was priceless:

"Oh yeah, sorry - but we've already purged your application from our system. If you want to start over, that's within your rights".

Pretty confident that some accountant somewhere figured that it was in the banks favor to just take my house outright instead of renegotiating the mortgage.