“We accept the board’s findings as a critical part of our journey to rebuild trust,” he said in a statement. He said the company will “continue to review the report and incorporate its key findings.”

The bank’s shares gained 0.6 percent to $55.18 at 9:48 a.m. in New York, and are little changed for the year.

Board Pressure

The board also is under pressure. Last week, proxy adviser Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. urged investors to remove most directors for failing to provide “timely and sufficient risk oversight.”

Employee terminations had begun as early as 2002, when almost every worker at a branch in Colorado was found “gaming” targets -- including issuing unauthorized debit cards -- while participating in an internal promotion, according to the report. Stumpf, then an executive in that division, was notified.

Two years later, internal investigators raised alarms in a memo, projecting that incidents of gaming within the division had surged 10-fold since 2000, and that annual firings would soon surpass 220. Employees were blaming unrealistic sales targets. “The incentive to cheat is based on the fear of losing their jobs for not meeting performance expectations,” the memo’s authors wrote. Managers, in turn, felt the problem could be fixed with training and trying harder to catch and punish wrongdoers, the report found.

It doesn’t appear Tolstedt, already one of the retail banking division’s most senior executives, received that warning, according to the report. But in an email to Stumpf that year, she said she was aware of the tensions that could result from trying to push more products to every customer -- a practice known as cross-selling.

Many banks “encourage the wrong sales behavior,” she wrote. “You have to balance cross sell with the right incentive plan and other measures so that you ensure you have quality.”

She didn’t follow her own advice, the report found.

The board’s investigation focused on senior-level managers and won’t result in further firings or punitive pay decisions, Sanger said on the call. Company executives, however, are continuing their own investigations into lower-ranking managers and could take additional actions, he said.