![]() Still, it is a reminder that stories can be lurking everywhere. The clue was wispy – it’s hard to believe that a couple of bank overcharges were the tip of an iceberg that involved 2 million illegally opened bank and credit card accounts. In this case, news had actually happened to an editor. The bank has said it will try to help customers harmed by improper reports to credit bureaus.Īs a career investigative journalist with decades of experience, I’m not quite sure what to make of all this. The board also announced that Carrie Tolstedt, the head of the community banking division at the time it opened fraudulent accounts, had agreed to return stock grants worth about $19 million. Wells Fargo’s board announced on Tuesday that it would claw back $41 million of compensation due to Stumpf. “This is a big deal - if information was sent into the credit bureaus because of these falsely opened accounts, the impacts of this are far more than the fees and fines that could be associated with that,” Tester said at the hearing. ![]() Stumpf acknowledged that the very act of opening a credit card can lower a person’s credit score and that this undoubtedly had an effect on customers’ ability to borrow. “There must have been instances where that negative information was sent to credit bureaus,” Tester said. Jon Tester, the Montana Democrat, specifically raised the question of whether the fake accounts and improper fees harmed customers’ credit ratings. ![]() Last week, John Stumpf, the CEO of Wells Fargo, was hauled before the Senate Banking Committee for a hearing in which he was excoriated for his handling of the scandal. Somehow, in the late-year blizzard of great stories, I had missed one.Īs has become increasingly clear, Reckard had an enormous scoop. ![]() One former employee was quoted by name as saying he had opened accounts for customers without their permission. Scott Reckard of the Los Angeles Times describing how Wells Fargo had pressured its employees to “cross-sell’’ accounts. I became even more annoyed with myself when I looked back and discovered a Dec. The employees, for their part, said they were responding to crushing pressure from managers to generate new fees. The bank said it had fired 5300 employees for improper actions that involved as many as 1.5 million bank accounts and 565,000 credit card accounts. This month, I was more than a little chagrined when news broke that Wells Fargo was paying federal and California authorities $185 million in fines for opening accounts without customers’ permission. Maybe they weren’t as dumb as we thought.)ĭetermined not to be the editor whose life events turn into assignments, I did not ask for a story on the refusal of Wells Fargo to set things right with the credit bureaus they had notified. (To be fair, Landmark Communications ended up creating the Weather Channel, an asset that eventually sold for $3.5 billion. Virtually every summer day, editors assigned stories on the heat or thunderstorms to some hapless reporter unfortunate to be sitting in direct sight of the city desk. Random events and pet peeves are not often a great starting point for serious stories.Įarly in my career, I worked for a newspaper chain whose leadership was obsessed with the weather. Reporters view editor-generated stories as the bane of their existence, and not without reason. There’s an old saying in the journalism business for this sort of thinking: News is what happens to an editor.Īs with so many newsroom aphorisms, it’s meant to be proclaimed with an eye roll and a tone of deep sarcasm. It seemed outrageous, and as the editor in chief of an investigative news operation, I thought about asking Paul Kiel, ProPublica’s crack reporter on bank shenanigans, to take a look. After an increasingly frustrating series of exchanges at the local branch, the bank agreed to wipe out the charges but said I would have to deal with the credit agencies on my own. The failure to pay these charges (bills were sent to my old address and never caught up with me) resulted in penalties and a report to a credit agency. It seemed bizarre, particularly because I had gone in person to a newly opened local branch of my West Coast bank to make sure the accounts were shut down. Bank accounts I was certain I had closed were inexplicably racking up service charges. Several years after I returned to New York from Oregon, I made a strange discovery.
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