Timeline of the Wells Fargo Accounts Scandal

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton took on the Wells Fargo & Co bogus-accounts case in a letter to the bank’s customers to be released on Tuesday, when Wells Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf will testify before a Senate committee. “You should resign”, Warren said at the end of a near-monologue about the broader failures of the banking system.

“I do want to make it clear that there was no orchestrated effort, or scheme as some have called it, by the company”, he told lawmakers.

One analyst said he thinks Tuesday could mark the beginning of a tide turning, and that Wells Fargo may ultimately decide to pursue a clawback of a portion of Tolstedt’s pay.

“Whether tacitly through sales guides and employee training manuals, which I’ve reviewed, or more explicitly from demands from hard-driving managers, you and your senior executives created an environment where this culture of deception and deceit thrived”, said Sen.

If a bank teller took a handful of $20 bills from a Wells Fargo drawer, they could be charged with theft, yet when the fraudulent activity came to light, Stumpf kept his job, while blaming “thousands of $12 an hour employees that were just trying to make cross-sell quotas that made you rich”, said Warren.

Wells Fargo’s 15-member board includes a former Federal Reserve governor, a former CEO of accounting firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu and two former cabinet secretaries. The timeline is important because it involves Wells Fargo’s internal controls just a few years after a breakdown in risk management wrecked the economy and led to the punishing USA financial crisis of 2008-09.

The House Financial Services Committee, led by Chairman Jeb Hensarling, said last week it also plans to conduct its own investigation and will hold a separate hearing later this month.

In announcing the fine, regulators said Wells Fargo sales employees opened more than 2 million bank and credit card accounts that may not have been authorized by customers.

“The board has the tools to hold senior management accountable, including me and Carrie Tolstedt”, Stumpf said.

Warren told Stumpf he should “give back the money you took while this scam was going on and you should be criminally investigated by both the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission”. Stumpf said, “We’ve been thinking about that”.

Under the settlement with regulators, Wells Fargo neither admitted nor denied the allegations.

CFPB’s Cordray noted that Wells Fargo notified the OCC about the fraud in 2013 but did not alert the CFPB until 2015. Wells Fargo has already fired more than 5,000 employees in connection with the fraud – but more than 90 percent of those fired were ranked lower than branch manager.

Tolstedt was told that the company was “going in a different direction”, in part because of the misconduct discovered in her unit, Stumpf said.

“Senator Warren didn’t consider and isn’t concerned with whether her taking CEO John Stumpf to task for his handling of Wells Fargo’s fraud might negatively affect the value of her mutual funds”, said Warren’s press secretary, Lacey Rose, in a statement.

“You have done something I’ve never seen in 10 years: You have united this committee – and not in a good way”, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), the ranking minority-party member of the committee. And that’s not because you ran the numbers and found that the average customer needed eight banking accounts, it is because ‘eight rhymes with great.’ This was your rationale, right there in your 2010 annual report.

Stumpf offered some detail at the hearing about who was sacked, saying “bankers, bank managers, managers of managers, and even an area president”.