Judge Blasts Ex-Wells Fargo Execs

wells fargo

An administrative law judge has affirmed that three former audit and risk management executives at Wells Fargo should face millions in penalties for their sloppy oversight during the bank’s fake-account scandal in the 2010s. The judge, assigned to the Office of Financial Institution Adjudication, issued his ruling on Wednesday after lengthy proceedings to investigate the…

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Wells Fargo Chief Auditor Passes

wells fargo

Sad news from Wells Fargo this weekend: Julie Scammahorn, the bank’s chief auditor since 2019 and a long-time senior audit professional in the banking industry, passed away on Thursday.  A spokesman for Wells Fargo confirmed Scammahorn’s death on Friday, saying she died after a brief illness. Other sources have told Radical Compliance that Scammahorn had…

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SEC Charges Wells Fargo Execs

wells fargo

The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged two former top executives at Wells Fargo with misleading investors about the bank’s financial performance — the latest chapter in the endless saga of regulators trying to hold Wells Fargo folks accountable for the bank’s disastrously bad behavior.  The SEC charged John Stumpf, who had been CEO of…

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Wells Fargo, You Sneaky Jerks!

wells fargo

We have an update on the billions and billions that Wells Fargo has been spending to rectify its many compliance woes — that, sadly, the bank has adjusted its line-item reporting so we can’t get a good estimate on its spending any more.  You might recall that earlier this summer, CEO Charlie Scharf lamented that…

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Wells Fargo’s Staggering Compliance Costs

wells fargo

Wells Fargo filed its latest quarterly report on Tuesday, and you may have seen news that new CEO Charlie Scharf wants to cut back spending on outside compliance consulting dramatically — spending that he described as “beyond anything I’ve ever seen.”  That spending, of course, stems from the seemingly endless number of compliance failures Wells…

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Wells Fargo, Part III: Mundane Securities Stuff

enforcement

Today we get more pedestrian with Wells Fargo and its unauthorized accounts scandal. Sure, the misconduct was egregious and leadership was a disgrace — but how, precisely, did Wells Fargo violate securities law and get a $500 million wallop from the SEC?  By sketchy use of non-financial metrics.  You almost have to laugh. Wells Fargo…

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Wells Fargo, Part II: Leadership Fails

leadership

Today we continue to examine the misconduct at Wells Fargo by examining the failures of leadership that allowed its unauthorized accounts scandal to happen. After all, poor leadership is the sort of dysfunction that could happen at any company, so what happened here is important to understand. In our first post about Wells Fargo earlier…

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Wells Fargo, Part I: How This Happened

wells fargo

Wells Fargo reached a $3 billion settlement with the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission last week, to resolve civil and criminal charges into its unauthorized account scandal from the 2010s. Let’s take a look, since the facts here are a powerful example of how a company can engineer its culture and operations…

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Compliance Lessons: Credit Suisse vs. Wells Fargo

lessons

One big lesson for compliance and audit executives this year will be the risks that swirl around compensation and incentives. Wells Fargo will be Exhibit A in that discussion, and rightly so. Still, the more I look at the SEC’s enforcement action against Credit Suisse last week, where it fined the bank $90 million for…

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Risky Talk: Compliance Officers and CEO Pay

compensation

Should the chief compliance officer have a role in setting executive pay? That was a big question asked at the Society of Corporate Compliance & Ethics annual conference this week. You couldn’t escape the subject. More than 1,700 compliance professionals had gathered to talk about good corporate conduct, and we had examples of bad corporate conduct…

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