Congress is turning up the heat on Wells Fargo following the revelation last summer that it created phony bank accounts.
The House Financial Services Committee held a hearing on the scandal September 29. Three weeks earlier, Wells had agreed to pay $190 million to settle charges by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency that the institution created 2 million phony bank accounts and credit cards and signed up customers for services they did not approve.
Since then, the committee’s investigation has continued and staffers have obtained more than100,000 pages of documents from Wells Fargo and regulators, committee spokesperson Jeff Emerson said Friday.
But those regulators only include the OCC and CFPB and not the Securities and Exchange Commission. There has been considerable pressure by Congressional Democrats, including Massachusetts’ Sen. Elizabeth Warren, for the SEC to investigate Wells. In the last weeks of their tenures, then SEC Chair Mary Jo White and Enforcement Director Andrew Ceresney would neither admit nor deny a Wells Fargo investigation had commenced.
On Friday, Warren attacked the Labor Department for deleting a web page where Wells Fargo workers could report potential labor violations and other potential illegal activity. The site was removed after President Donald Trump took office.
"Taking down this website enables Wells Fargo to escape full responsibility for its fraudulent actions,” Warren said in a letter to the DOL.
Wells had been accused of firing workers who refused to sell phony accounts.