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Compliance Corner: Wells Fargo

Editorial Staff

5 December 2019

A US regulator warns that has a big backlog of employee human-resources complaints and poor controls on pay, adding to the list of challenges for the bank’s new CEO, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The California-based bank has been working to rebuild its reputation under new CEO Charles Scharf – hired in October – following a 2016 fake-account scandal. The saga led to resignations of top executives and a shakeup in its leadership. 

The WSJ said the human resources complaints came in a July letter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The newspaper cited unnamed sources.

Challenges include thousands of employee complaints, an inadequate policy for clawing back compensation from executives and controls for administering pay that are not tight enough to ward off potential misconduct. 

The report added that Wells Fargo declined to comment on specific details, but said it was making progress on its regulatory duties, and said more work needed to be done.

In September 2016 it was revealed that some Wells Fargo staff had opened accounts without clients’ consent, shining a light on an aggressive sales culture.