Former Wells Fargo Senior Executive Carrie Tolstedt Agrees to Settle SEC Fraud Charges for Misleading Investors About Abusive Sales Practices to Inflate a Key Performance Metric

The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced its settlement with the former head of Wells Fargo & Co.’s Community Bank, Carrie L. Tolstedt, in which she has agreed to pay a $3 million penalty stemming from charges brought in 2020 for her role in allegedly misleading investors about the success of the Community Bank, Wells Fargo’s core business. The SEC previously settled related charges against Wells Fargo and its former CEO and Chairman, John Stumpf. According to the SEC’s complaint against Tolstedt, from mid-2014 through mid-2016, Tolstedt publicly described and endorsed Wells Fargo’s “cross-sell metric” as a means of measuring Wells Fargo’s financial success despite the fact that this metric was inflated by accounts and services that were unused, unneeded, or unauthorized.