I feel like we all KNEW this was going to happen…but let’s pretend like we are surprised anyway.
Remember last week when the news broke about Wells Fargo firing 5,300 employees who were part of a scam to rip off innocent customers for millions? Well, we have an update!
The exec from Wells Fargo, Carrie Tolstedt, who was responsible for the “department” that opened more than two million unauthorized accounts gets to walk away at the end of the year with $125million. That sounds about right.
From the article:
“Carrie Tolstedt served as the company’s head of Community Banking for eight years, during which employees met sales quotas and racked up fees by opening 1.5million bank accounts and 565,000 credit cards for customers without their consent.
On Thursday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined Wells Fargo a record $185million, and 5,300 employees were fired over the course of five years as a result of the scandal.
(CAUTION: There is some foul language in this video.)
But Tolstedt has received praise and a $7million dollar bonus in recent years for ‘strong cross-sell ratios’ that were partly generated by the fraudulent practice employees commonly referred to as ‘sandbagging’.”
Not only did she not get in trouble, but Wells Fargo CEO- John Stumpf- called her ‘a standard-bearer of our culture’. I’m not going to lie, in the last couple of months, the sheer greed and deception perpetrated by people in authority has nearly shocked me into despair.
No, she leaves with her head held high and $124.6million in stock, options, and shares. It also appears she won’t be penalized by Well Fargo’s ‘claw back’ policies- where executives pay back a portion, or sometimes all, of their bonus (a policy created to curb risky behavior). Which is odd because Wells Fargo policy states they will, “revoke bonuses if an executive causes ‘reputational harm’ to the bank or fails to ‘identify or monitor’ risks.” Um, that’s what she did!
“Wells Fargo will pay a $100 million fine to the CFPB’s Civil Penalty Fund, $35 million to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and another $50 million to the City and County of Los Angeles. The bank has also agreed to pay more than $5million in restitution to customers. The customer fraud probe, which pointed to illegal practices stretching back to 2011, cost 5,300 Wells Fargo employees their jobs. But regulators stopped short of pointing any fingers at the bank’s executives, despite acknowledging systemic problems like the lack of oversight.”
