Bank was asked to respond on irregularities in its auto-insurance and mortgage-lending units
the bank conceded in a news release that for years it had forced nearly 600,000 customers who financed their car purchases with Wells Fargo to pay for collision coverage they didn’t need. The bank said about 20,000 customers had their cars wrongly repossessed. Those customers failed to pay the improper insurance charges.
.. The enforcement action being weighed against Wells Fargo is a cease-and-desist order, the people familiar with the matter said. Also known as a consent order, it is among an array of formal enforcement proceedings the OCC can take when it determines that deficiencies in a bank’s operations are severe, uncorrected, unsafe or unsound... Last year’s disclosure about the unauthorized accounts led the OCC to issue Wells Fargo a cease-and-desist order. The regulator levied penalties of $35 million in that September 2016 action.. Several weeks after that, the OCC placed additional limitations on the bank, including preventing so-called golden parachutes for departing executives... In the past five years, Wells Fargo has received four new cease-and-desist orders from the Comptroller of the Currency; in two of those actions, including the one involving the opening of unrequested accounts, the regulator assessed a total of $55 million in penalties.