Wells Fargo’s Regulator Admits It Missed Red Flags -<br />By DANIELLE IVORYAPRIL 19, 2017<br />For years, as Wells Fargo secretly set up millions of fake bank<br />and credit card accounts without customers’ consent, the bank’s federal regulator was learning of hundreds of whistle-blower complaints against the company for its sales tactics.<br />Mr. Sloan said he thought the report offered a “fair description of her management style”<br />and added, “Maybe if she had made herself available, the report would have been a bit different.”<br />The federal regulator’s report said that in 2010, the agency asked Ms. Tolstedt about the whistle-blower cases, but she played down the issue, attributing the high volume of cases to a culture<br />that “encourages valid complaints, which are then investigated and appropriately addressed.”<br />Stacy Cowley contributed reporting.<br />And even after the regulator confronted a Wells Fargo executive in 2010 about 700 cases of whistle-blower complaints, the regulator did not require the<br />bank to provide adequate analysis, according to the report, which was issued by the comptroller’s office of enterprise governance and its ombudsman.<br />Timothy J. Sloan, the chief executive of Wells Fargo, discussed the aftermath in an interview<br />on Wednesday, saying, “We had to fundamentally change how we are organized.”<br />Mr. Sloan added that last week’s report was “incredibly difficult to read” because of “the very direct criticism of a company<br />that I care a lot about.” Some of the facts unearthed in the report “were new to me,” he said.
