A former bank executive says he was fired for bringing attention to the matter, because he claims that the company held fake job interviews for minority candidates for positions that had already been filled.
Joe Bruno, a former executive in the wealth management division at Wells Fargo's corporate offices in Jacksonville, Florida, said that the company would interview minority candidates for positions that adhere to an informal policy promoting diversity, but also noticed that the candidates were often interviewing for jobs that had been promised to someone else.
Bruno was fired last summer after telling his superiors that the interviews were inappropriate and ethically and morally wrong. The Times reported that Bruno was one of seven current and former Wells Fargo employees who said they were instructed to interview diverse candidates for positions even if the decision had already been made to hire a different candidate.
Raschelle Burton, a Wells Fargo spokeswoman, said that "To the extent that individual employees are engaging in the behavior as described by The New York Times, we do not tolerate it," said Raschelle Burton, a Wells Fargo spokeswoman.
Wells Fargo said that it could not verify Bruno's claim in a statement to Fox News Digital.
A spokesman for the company said we researched all of the claims the reporter shared with us in advance of the story's publication and could not corroborate the claims as factual.
In August 2020, Wells Fargo agreed to pay $8 million for a settlement against a claim from the Department of Labor in August 2020, amid widespread protests and rioting following the death of George Floyd.
Months before that, the company agreed to a $3 billion settlement to resolve a fake account scandal and admitted that it wrongly collected millions of dollars in fees and interest, harmed the credit ratings of some customers, and illegally used customers' private information.
The company admitted that millions of accounts were opened without customers knowing or under false pretenses because of unrealistic sales goals.