Wells Fargo’s Regulator Admits It Missed Red Flags -
By DANIELLE IVORYAPRIL 19, 2017
For years, as Wells Fargo secretly set up millions of fake bank
and credit card accounts without customers’ consent, the bank’s federal regulator was learning of hundreds of whistle-blower complaints against the company for its sales tactics.
Mr. Sloan said he thought the report offered a “fair description of her management style”
and added, “Maybe if she had made herself available, the report would have been a bit different.”
The federal regulator’s report said that in 2010, the agency asked Ms. Tolstedt about the whistle-blower cases, but she played down the issue, attributing the high volume of cases to a culture
that “encourages valid complaints, which are then investigated and appropriately addressed.”
Stacy Cowley contributed reporting.
And even after the regulator confronted a Wells Fargo executive in 2010 about 700 cases of whistle-blower complaints, the regulator did not require the
bank to provide adequate analysis, according to the report, which was issued by the comptroller’s office of enterprise governance and its ombudsman.
Timothy J. Sloan, the chief executive of Wells Fargo, discussed the aftermath in an interview
on Wednesday, saying, “We had to fundamentally change how we are organized.”
Mr. Sloan added that last week’s report was “incredibly difficult to read” because of “the very direct criticism of a company
that I care a lot about.” Some of the facts unearthed in the report “were new to me,” he said.
