"A piece of shit": Government report on Wells Fargo corruption shows top executives' direct complicity in millions of acts of fraud

Last week, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency handed down stiff penalties for John Stumpf (previously) who was CEO of Wells Fargo during its scandal-haunted decade, during which time it stole from rich people, poor people, veterans, active-service military personnel, homeowners, small businesses, etc, as well as 2,000,000 ordinary customers who had fraudulent accounts opened in their names in order to bleed them of transaction fees, sometimes at the expense of their good credit and even their financial solvency. Under the deal, Stumpf will have to pay $17.5m in fines and cannot ever work in finance again (don't worry, he's still a multi-multi-multi millionaire).

The OCC didn't just penalize Stumpf: it has pending cases against most of Wells Fargo's C-suite during the relevant years, and it has published a 100-page report on its investigations, including first-person accounts from bank personnel who were pressured to commit fraud on penalty of losing their jobs and having their names fraudulently entered into an industry-wide blacklist of bank employees who had been caught committing illegal acts.

The report reveals both the incredible toll this took on those employees ("I was in the 1991 Gulf War. ... I had less stress in the 1991 Gulf War than working for Wells Fargo") and the clanging bells and flashing red lights that Stumpf and Carrie Tolstedt (previously), another disgraced former Wells Fargo exec, roundly ignored.

These warning signs were pretty incredible: after one presentation by Tolstedt downplaying the seriousness of the rot in the bank, a board member cursed her out, calling her reassurances "a piece of shit." Read the rest