U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, met with Wells Fargo President and Chief Operating Officer Tim Sloan this week, asking him for documents explaining how the company had used quotas and bonuses that encouraged front-line employees to open more than 2 million deposit and credit-card accounts that customers didn’t authorize. Regulators said 5,300 employees and managers were fired.

Cummings noted: “It is unclear whether the executives who orchestrated this scheme will be held accountable.”|Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat who is among the Banking Committee’s most dedicated Wall Street critics, said Thursday that Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf and other senior executives shouldn’t be able to keep their jobs and “keep raking in millions of dollars in bonuses.” Warren argued in a Bloomberg Television interview that Tolstedt got bonuses based on the amount of fraud in her division, and she said there should “absolutely” be clawbacks at Wells Fargo.

Mark Folk, a Wells Fargo spokesman, declined to comment on Warren’s remarks.

‘Strong Policies’

The bank has “strong” policies in place for snatching back bonuses that are meant to “discourage our executives from taking imprudent or excessive risks,” the company said in its proxy. Maintaining such broad clawback procedures -- even if they fall short of what regulators are pursuing -- has become common practice across the industry.

“I think the tools are already there,” said Kelly Malafis, a partner at Compensation Advisory Partners.

But nothing forces banks to adopt the tougher restrictions regulators are working on. The rule has been a long time coming, now six years after Dodd-Frank required it. Meanwhile, lobbyists have been circling.

‘Competitive Disadvantage’

In June, officials from Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, Bank of New York Mellon Corp., Barclays Plc and other firms carried their incentive-compensation wish list to a meeting at the Securities and Exchange Commission -- one of six agencies writing the rule. And in July, a letter from financial-industry lobbyists said the proposal would be expensive to implement, undermine what the industry is already doing to address pay and “place the regulated financial services industry at a harmful competitive disadvantage.”

Wells Fargo weighed in with its own letter in July. The lender argued the proposal is “not appropriately tied to risk.” The bank praised its own approach to bonuses, saying it’s effective in “promoting and rewarding appropriate behaviors.”