Sen. Elizabeth Warren called Tuesday for a perp walk for Wells Fargo executives who oversaw the bank’s fake accounts scandal.
“The only way we’re ever going to stop these scandals is to hold executives personally accountable, to fire the people who are responsible and when they break the law, to march some of them out in handcuffs,” the Massachusetts Democrat said at a Senate Banking Committee hearing.
Warren and other Democrats harshly criticized Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan at the hearing, which was called to update the Senate on the fake accounts scandal that was recently revealed to have affected 3.5 million accounts.
“At best you were incompetent, at worst you were complicit, and either way, you should be fired,” Warren told Sloan earlier in the morning, after reviewing his role at the bank as chief financial officer and chief operating officer during the time that the bank was creating the unwanted accounts.
Warren also has called on regulators to remove some members of Wells Fargo’s board of directors.
Wells Fargo’s previous CEO, John Stumpf, stepped down last fall after federal regulators fined the bank $100 million and he faced questioning on Capitol Hill.
On Tuesday, Sloan faced similarly hard questions.
Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, bluntly asked him why the federal government should continue to allow his bank to have a charter. When Sloan responded that the bank provides jobs to hundreds of thousands of people and services to one-third of American households, Schatz accused him of saying the bank is too big.
“The first thing out of your mouth was your size,” Schatz said.
During the hearing, Sloan contended that he has imposed “fundamental” changes in Wells Fargo’s practices, including addressing the incentives that led employees to open unwanted accounts for customers so they could hit sales targets.
Democrats weren’t sold.
“We need to see that there’s actually a culture change,” said Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D.
“I do not hear a level of culture change that satisfies me today,” she added.
