Wells Fargo board slams former CEO in scathing report after sales scandal

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Witnesses told Wells Fargo investigators that Conboy encouraged bankers to sell duplicate accounts regardless of customer need.

The report said Tolstedt hid the scale of the misconduct from the board, which only discovered that 5,300 staff had been fired for opening more than 2 million unauthorized accounts when the bank reached a $185 million settlement with regulators in September a year ago. The Department of Justice is investigating the matter and the House Financial Services Committee is reviewing more than 100,000 company documents.

Stumpf and former retail bank leader Carrie Tolstedt will forfeit more of their pay in the wake of the investigation. After the Los Angeles City Attorney filed a suit over the bank's sales practices in May 2015, he sent an email to Sloan vowing to fight.

"He also failed to appreciate the seriousness of the problem and the substantial reputational risk to Wells Fargo". Wells has changed its sales practices, and called tens of millions of customers to check on whether they truly opened the accounts in question.

The report described a pressure cooker sales operation in which reaching aggressive new account goals often overshadowed repeated complaints about employees' risky behavior.

Ellison also asked if some Minnesotans had multiple accounts that were affected.

Sloan, who took the helm in October, announced the hiring spurt on a conference call with journalists Monday as he ticked off reforms and promised managers are learning from a scathing 113-page report the board issued hours earlier on the long-running abuses.

The bank fired many low-ranking employees for opening the fake accounts, but there was little questioning of the role of perverse incentives as a factor in the scandal.

In an interview with MinnPost, Ellison said that the bank's estimates could be conservative, and that more Minnesotans could have been affected. "It undermines people's trust in institutions like banks". There was no joined-up effort by either the bank's human resources or legal divisions to track and analyze the problem. As NPR reports, the bank now says it has "recovered more than $180 million in executive compensation over the scandal" - roughly the amount of total fines imposed on Wells Fargo by CFPB past year.

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Scrutiny of Wells Fargo, and skepticism about the bank, are likely to continue, according to analysts. A careful reading of the report reveals a board that took months, even years, to get its arms around the scandal despite plenty of warnings about its nature magnitude. Wells was aiming for as many as eight financial "products" per household. So employees opened additional accounts without customers knowledge or consent, and moved money around customers' accounts to create the impression they were real.

Former Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf testifies before a Senate Banking Committee hearing on the firm's sales practices on Capitol Hill in September. The bank is still under investigation by Congress, state and federal authorities. Though based in San Francisco, it has had a large corporate presence here since 1998, when it merged with Norwest Corp.

The board panel clawed back an additional pay from Stumpf because he allegedly reacted too slowly in dealing with the scandal that the company was facing during his time.

Though plenty of Ellison's constituents are Wells Fargo customers or employees, banks behaving badly is a bread-and-butter topic for Ellison.

The report comes about two weeks before the bank's annual shareholder meeting on April 25, when all directors 15 directors will be up for re-election.

About 5,300 employees were fired during the same time period for sales practices violations, the bank has said.

"His commitment to them colored his response when sales-practice issues became more prominent in 2013 and subsequent years". For years, the bank's management would say it doesn't have branches; it has "stores".

"There's a tremendous amount of pressure from regulators to throw someone under the bus", said Duke Law School professor James Cox, who specializes in corporate and securities law.

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