HUD partial claim sent to collections??

[Elliot Ott]

So, my wife and I purchased our house in 2009 with an FHA loan. We got into a little financial trouble and did a loan mod under the Making Homes Affordable act (end of 2011). In essence received a partial claim from HUD for about $12k but also Forbearance from BofA for around $7300. Being relatively new homeowners we did not read the paperwork as best we should. Knew we needed to repay once we sold/refinanced but honestly missed the whole $12k from HUD. We repaid the $7300 at closing (over a year ago now) but just received a letter from Albany Financial Operations Center saying our HUD partial claim of $12k was sent to collections.

Really confused on all this. Figure all this is my responsibility but just looking for any advise seeing that I don't have $12k laying around and why we owe so much. I realize it's way late to question BofA now, but $20k seems like way more than it would've cost to bring our loan current. We purposely missed 1 months payment for 3 months to qualify for relief. Our payments were only dropped around $300 so i'm just confused on how we racked up $20k in debt and how we were allowed to sell/settle with this basically 2nd mortgage.