WASHINGTON–One senator is calling on the president and CEO of Wells Fargo to fix the big bank’s problems once and for all.
In a letter to Wells Fargo CEO Charles W. Scharf, Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio (D-OH) called on Scharf to “once and for all address Wells Fargo’s governance, risk management and hiring practices — weaknesses that have plagued the bank for almost a decade.”
As CUToday.info has extensively reported, Wells Fargo has engaged in numerous scandals, beginning with a massive scam that involved fake accounts for millions of customers followed by improperly repossessing service members’ cars, overcharging small business retailers, paying a $1 billion settlement for mortgage locks and auto lending issues and more. It should be noted that Scharf was not CEO when many of those crimes occurred.
More recently, Wells Fargo has been accused of conducting sham interviews with Black and female candidates, and of declining to refinance Black homeowners’ mortgages while interest rates were low.
In his letter, Brown said Wells Fargo had failed to properly oversee its system for alerting the authorities to suspicious activity by its brokerage customers. In mid-May, the SEC fined Wells Fargo $7 million for violations of anti-money-laundering laws, claiming the bank failed to file more than 30 SARs between 2017 and 2021.
Big Profits, Big Pay Package
“Despite these failures, Wells Fargo made $21.5 billion in 2021 and announced a plan to double dividends and buy back $18 billion in stock between third quarter 2021 and second quarter 2022,” Brown stated in the letter.
While all of this has taken place, Brown stated, Scharf was paid $24.5 million in 2021 in total compensation, a 20% increase from 2020 and 290 times the median employee salary at the bank, according to the letter.
Brown called on Scharf to prepare a plan to fix all of its issues, and further noted Scharf will be testifying soon along with other bank CEOs at an upcoming Senate hearing on banks. The date for the hearing has not yet been announced.
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