Exhibit 1247 ยท Board investigation report (SEC filing, Schedule 14A additional materials)
Sales Practices Investigation Report of the Independent Directors of the Board of Wells Fargo & Company (10 April 2017), as filed with the SEC
There was a disinclination among the Community Bank's senior leadership, regardless of the scope of improper behavior or the number of terminated employees, to see the problem as systemic.
Independent directors' report on retail banking sales practices, based on 100 interviews and more than 35 million documents. Finds the root cause was the distortion of the Community Bank's sales culture and performance management system, with pressure on employees, and finds that senior leaders blamed individual employees.
- Source
- Independent Directors of the Board of Wells Fargo & Company, with Shearman & Sterling LLP
- Date
- 10 April 2017
- Quoted from
- Report, Executive Summary, p. 6 (page numbers from the report's own footers as reproduced in the SEC filing)
- Grade
- Primary record
- Document
- https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/72971/000119312517118654/d375947ddefa14a.htm
- Accessed
- 2026-11-10
- Cited by
- Findings citing this exhibit
- Note
- Other lines read: p. 5, 'It was convenient instead to blame the problem of low quality and unauthorized accounts and other employee misconduct on individual wrongdoers and poor management in the field rather than on the Community Bank's sales model.' p. 6, 'It was common to blame employees who violated Wells Fargo's rules without analyzing what caused or motivated them to do so.' p. 7, 'Employees who engaged in misconduct most frequently associated their behavior with sales pressure, rather than compensation incentives'. Overview, Principal Findings: 'The root cause of sales practice failures was the distortion of the Community Bank's sales culture and performance management system'. p. 56 quotes a May 2015 email from the then CEO ending 'This is not systemic.' The report text at that point records he acknowledged in interview that 1% was too high. The directors' report states the Board learned of the roughly 5,300 terminations on 8 September 2016. Quote above uses a straight apostrophe in place of the source's curly one. The 110-page PDF at wellsfargo.com/assets/pdf/about/investor-relations/presentations/2017/board-report.pdf returned a block page to a script.