Wells Fargo “Hot Lines” Went Nowhere

Former Wells Fargo employees are angry over testimony from now-resigned CEO John G. Stumpf maintaining that he and other senior executives didn’t know about recently publicized internal fraud problems until 2013. They say that for years employees have been using the company’s ethics hot line to report wayward behavior, but they were ignored, except in some cases when it got them fired. Last month the company was hit with $185 million in fines for practices that included forging customers’ names and fraudulently opening as many as two million credit card and bank accounts. Said one former bank manager who was fired after contacting both the ethics hotline and HR, “Everybody knew there was fraud going on, and the people trying to flag it were the ones who got in trouble.”