Lawmakers call on Fed to turn over Wells Fargo’s exam reports for the last five years and other relevant documents for Congressional review

“The Fed’s decision to lift Wells Fargo’s asset cap despite mounting evidence that the firms’ systemic management failures persist is a direct giveaway to Wall Street at consumers’ expense.”

Read letter here

Today, Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), the Ranking Member on the House Financial Services Committee, and U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Ranking Member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, announced they wrote to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors detailing their concerns with the decision to lift Wells Fargo’s asset cap and urging them to reverse course.

“We write to urge you to immediately reverse yesterday’s embarrassing and unwarranted decision by the Federal Reserve (Fed) to remove Wells Fargo’s $1.95 trillion asset cap, which has been in place since 2018. The Fed put the growth cap in place in response to a series of outrageous scandals that affected millions of customers, and the Fed’s ill-informed elimination of the cap –if not reversed – will have a profound impact on its credibility as an impartial, consistent, and effective bank regulator and steward of the banking and financial system,” wrote the lawmakers.

The lawmakers continued: “The misconduct is ongoing: in the last year alone, Wells Fargo has been required by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to take “comprehensive corrective action” with its financial crimes risk management and anti-money laundering program after the OCC identified a range of violations related to the Bank Secrecy Act; sued by the CFPB for failing to protect consumers from rampant fraud on Zelle; and slapped with a $35 million fine by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for failing to act in the best interest of their investment clients.”

While the bank announced plans to pay employees $2,000 to commemorate the lifting of the asset cap, the lawmakers highlighted recent troubling employee accounts of discrimination and evidence that the bank is reinstating unrealistic goals and sales pressure tactics that got the bank in trouble in the first place.

The lawmakers also outlined how, if the Fed does not reverse course, it must provide the House Financial Services and Senate Banking Committees with Wells Fargo’s exam reports from the last five years and other related materials, similar to information that the Fed previously provided to the House Financial Services Committee when it conducted an investigation several years ago. “This information will allow Congress to better understand why you chose to reward the bank despite overwhelming public evidence that it has not remedied its systemic issues,” they concluded.

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