Two executives who were publicly excoriated over Wells Fargo's opening of millions of bogus accounts must give back millions more dollars in pay, the bank's board announced Monday. The board is clawing back an additional $47 million from Carrie Tolstedt, who headed the troubled sales division, and $28 million from former CEO John Stumpf.
Stumpf "was too slow" to see problems in sales practices that brought a $185 million punishment from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to a 110-page report released Monday by Wells Fargo's board. The report says he also failed to protect the bank's reputation from what the CFPB has called "the widespread illegal practice of secretly opening unauthorized deposit and credit card accounts."
Some 5,300 Wells Fargo employees lost their jobs over the fake-accounts scandal — a number far higher than the bank's board says it was initially led to believe. The report says Stumpf "did not appreciate the scope and severity of the problem" and that he "continued to publicly support the appropriateness of Wells Fargo's sales goals and to highlight that the vast majority of Wells Fargo employees 'got it right.' "
Both Stumpf and Tolstedt had previously been forced to return tens of millions of dollars. With the new clawbacks, Wells Fargo's board says, the bank has now recovered more than $180 million in executive compensation over the scandal.