Wells Fargo has rehired 1,780 workers who left the company in recent years, CEO Tim Sloan is expected to tell Congress on Tuesday, but it is not bringing back employees who were fired for alleged misconduct.
Sloan made the disclosure about rehiring former employees in his written testimony to the Senate Banking Committee, which the San Francisco bank released on Monday.
In the testimony, Sloan expressed a commitment to “former Wells Fargo team members who were affected by the Community Bank’s old ways of doing things.”
That is a reference to the unauthorized-account-opening scandal that engulfed the firm’s retail banking unit, known internally as the Community Bank. Between 2011 and 2016, roughly 5,300 employees were fired for their alleged role in the fraud.
Sloan’s testimony does not provide any information about the specific circumstances under which the 1,780 workers, all of whom have been rehired since September 2016, left the company.
But a company spokesman told American Banker that there is no overlap between the more than 5,000 fired employees and those who have been hired back more recently.
The spokesman said that the 5,300 fired workers are not eligible to be rehired. The rehired workers include some who left the company voluntarily and others who were let go but were still eligible to be rehired.
Wells Fargo did not disclose whether the 1,780 rehired employees include any workers who filed whistleblower complaints in connection with the fraudulent accounts.
When Sloan appears Tuesday on Capitol Hill, he is also expected to address newer revelations about improper customer charges in Wells Fargo’s auto lending business. His written testimony states that the company began issuing checks to affected customers last month.
“This issue is quite different from the previous sales-practices issues in our Community Bank, because this insurance was not a product that Wells Fargo team members were given an incentive to sell. Also, this is an issue we found and addressed ourselves,” Sloan said.
“It was a significant mistake that harmed a lot of people, and we are making it right,” he added.
Sloan’s testimony comes just over a year after his predecessor, John Stumpf, made a widely panned appearance before the same Senate committee. Stumpf resigned a few weeks later.
