Former Los Angeles Times business reporter E. Scott Reckard spoke to Columbia Journalism Review’s Pete Vernon about how he uncovered fraud within Wells Fargo that resulted in the bank paying $185 million in fines last week.
Here is an excerpt:
Going back to the beginning of your reporting on Wells Fargo, what was the process that led to this story?
I got an email from one of the editors, Pat McMahon, saying there was this weird story. I talked to this [Wells Fargo employee] who claimed he had signed people up for accounts and services they didn’t need, but never without them knowing it—he would just talk them into it. Anyway, he told a story about these incredible pressures to make sales numbers and about how the branch had basically been setting records and getting kudos for doing this, but then people started complaining, and some trouble came down. Before too long, all these people got fired, these front line workers. He said all they were doing was responding to pressure from above and coaching from above about how to get the numbers up.
I had been sort of sensitized to these things [based on a career in business reporting]. I could have told the editor that it’s just some weird deal, but it sounded like a story to me. So we run this story that just said what it said. What I didn’t expect, and what happened, was that the phones started ringing off the hook and the emails started landing from people all over the place. Mainly current and former Wells Fargo employees, but customers too. They wanted to tell stories about what had happened to them.
A lot of credit goes to this editor I had, Brian Thevenot. We started going through this and it became clear that the scope was really quite big. Then the question became, how far do you push this? The main thing we were pushing for at first was to determine whether this was just something in the Southern California operations or whether it was something we saw elsewhere.
We decided that we had anecdotal stories that were so strong that they demonstrated that this was a systemic problem. In discussions with editors we decided to do a complete scrub of the court system, and found a lot of corroboration there, which ended up in the story. The process took the better part of two months, from October to December [2013], when the big story came out.
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