For Whistleblowers, Repercussions Are Felt Beyond Wells Fargo
For Whistleblowers, Repercussions Are Felt Beyond Wells Fargo
Chris Arnold
NPR
ARNOLD: Over the past few months, NPR has talked to former Wells Fargo workers in Florida, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Los Angeles and San Francisco. They all say that managers at the bank retaliated against them for calling the company's ethics line and pushing back against intense sales pressure to sign customers up for multiple credit cards and checking accounts.
ELIZABETH WARREN: We heard the reports on NPR about former Wells employees, and that's what got us interested. And so we started looking at the U5 and digging and finding more and more evidence of a big problem at Wells.
ARNOLD: Warren and two other senators sent a letter asking for answers from Wells Fargo about whether the bank retaliated against whistleblowers. And Warren is asking more broadly whether this U5 report card system is fair to workers.
The system is run by an industry group called FINRA. That's the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. On the one hand, if a worker takes advantage of customers, the system is effective at labeling the worker as a bad apple. But if a worker gets unfairly maligned by the bank or a manager, workers say it's almost impossible to get their records corrected. So their careers can be unfairly destroyed. Elizabeth Warren...
WARREN: The Wells Fargo scandal exposes how vulnerable bank employees are under the current system. I hope that we're going to see some changes come out of this.
Audio at the link.