 "Wells Fargo")
In 2005, the year John G Stumpf became president of Wells Fargo, Julie Tishkoff, then an administrative assistant at the bank, wrote to the company's human resources department about what she had seen: employees opening sham accounts, forging customer signatures and sending out unsolicited credit cards.
She kept complaining for four years, and she was not alone. For years similar or identical complaints from Wells Fargo workers flowed in to the bank's internal ethics hotline, its human resources department, and individual managers and supervisors. In at least two cases in 2011, employees wrote letters directly to Stumpf - who became the company's chief executive in 2007, and its board chairman in 2010 - to describe the illegal activities they had witnessed.
Since the ethics scandal erupted in public last month, Stumpf has testified twice in front of Congress that he and other senior managers only realised in 2013 that they had a big problem on their hands - two years after the bank had started firing people over the issue.
Now, regulators, lawmakers, current and former employees, and others are asking: How was it that this drumbeat of complaints did not set off loud alarm bells earlier? And why have the brunt of the firings fallen on low-level workers, not on the managers and executives who shaped the company's aggressive sales culture?
"It appears that there were activities going on that indicate you may have known much earlier" than 2013, Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, said while questioning Stumpf in a House Financial Services Committee hearing last month. Waters pointed to court filings from 2008 from employees who tried to blow whistles, and to a Wells Fargo sales quality manual that was updated in 2007 - just months after Stumpf became chief executive, and with his executive guidance - to remind employees that they needed to obtain a customer's consent before opening an account. Tishkoff was fired in 2009. At least two of her supervisors were aware of her complaints and ignored them, according to a wrongful termination lawsuit she filed against Wells Fargo in 2011. Those supervisors remain with the bank and are now regional presidents, responsible for overseeing thousands of workers at hundreds of branches. And since September 8, when Wells Fargo said it would pay $185 million in fines for opening as many as two million customer accounts and credit cards without authorisation, dozens of former employees have stepped forward to tell stories like Tishkoff's - describing the company's toxic sales culture and their own thwarted efforts to use the bank's internal channels to draw attention to the scope of the problem. "Everybody knew there was fraud going on, and the people trying to flag it were the ones who got in trouble," said Ricky M Hansen Jr, a former branch manager in Scottsdale, Arizona, who was fired after contacting both human resources and the ethics hotline about illegal accounts he had seen being opened.
©2016 The New York Times News Service
