Thread regarding Wells Fargo & Co. layoffs

I imagine “tech audit” is referring to ETAG, the IT Audit group in IA. I’m in ETAG. I would say we have the least to worry about but certainly are not a immune.

Believe Audit Managers will no longer have direct reports, which will free up individual contributors for other managers to get to the 1:7 ratio. Charlie says there are too many layers of management. There was a hiring freeze for half of last year, lifted slightly in Jan and Feb, then another hiring freeze started in March, but hiring has restarted again on a limited basis. The best performers are the ones who are leaving. The new way seems to be fewer people working a lot more hours.

What do you mean by "Tech Audit"? Do you mean the data analytics auditors?

How about Tech audit ?

@itjj- I agree, the incompetence is very embarrassing. I’m new at wf and I can’t believe the number of auditors who don’t know how to audit at a basic level. There’s a shocking number of people in audit from other areas of the bank. My first few weeks I thought my coworkers acted like they’d never taken an auditing course and then I realized they haven’t. I regret taking this job and am trying to get out ASAP.

I hope audit has cuts, Charlie needs to know the level of incompetence in audit. Julie is clueless. I had faith in her, but her changes have been superficial.

The 98% efficiency number is a joke, no one in reality does that. People are making up their time reporting to meet it, let's call it "rounding" generously.

She changed the audit plan to 12/31 end date and chased off tons of people and has not backfilled positions.

The majority of auditors are incompetent at Wells Fargo, it's actually embarrassing. The audit culture is what needs to change, she hasn't done that. She just mentions it, "we need to do more than SALY or Same as last year." Guess what? They still do.

I don’t believe you, unless you are speaking to jobs you applied for more than a month ago. There have been numerous reqs opened in the past 3 weeks. I know first hand that Senior Manager positions are actively being filled. I assume the same goes for the Principle and Senior Auditor roles I see open as well.

@ylf That doesn't mean the freeze is over. Those positions could have been canceled. I've had multiple jobs I've applied for come back with canceled req notices.

I’m in audit. I don’t expect cuts to be deep but could see the Audit Manager level taking a hit. Very few AMs have more than 3-5 direct reports. The hiring freeze appears to be partially ended as of a few weeks ago. There were 15-20 open positions the past couple weeks, down to 10 this week. During the first have of the year that number was usually at 2-3. Last year it was typical to have 20+ open requisitions at any time, so hiring is still down, but certainly not frozen.

Honestly, who knows.

Audit is a mess right now. Julie is a terrible leader and doesn’t communicate with anyone. SAOG has no idea what they are doing, they are scared of Julie and as a result there’s only even more confusing messaging coming from them.

Good leaders are bolting from Audit right now.

Audit will get hit. I’d expect anyone rated a 1 during Mid Year is as good as gone. Julie has continually tried to make things more efficient (which she’s done simply by adding new process LOL she’s seriously a freaking joke) because Audit is bloated. When Julie started, WF IA was bigger in size than every other bank, yet, produced less deliverables (which honestly makes sense due to all of the regulatory stuff Audit has to monitor). Her goal has solely been efficiency. Do more with less. WF Audit has not been backfilling roles as people leave since mid February. They have been slimming down for the last 6 months. Some areas are getting very lean (ETAG, for instance, is a mess). Julie and the new EADs have been extremely successful in chasing off ALL of the high performers in Audit.

This is a long way of saying nobody knows because Julie’s only communication style is to not communicate. I’d anticipate some layoffs but since Audit laid a lot of ground and since Julie and the new EADs have spent 6 months chasing off the high performers, I don’t think the layoffs will be deep.

As far as not hearing from julie, she saw the blowback from the job families project and the conflict of interest initiative (if you’re wondering audit threatened to fire any team member who had a relative in the department even if they weren’t on their team after encouraging ya to bring on friends and family) so she is using her Citibank strategy and opps to communicate to the department. The current SAOG is too clueless to come up with their own policies so whatever you hear from them comes straight from julie.

Internal audit is likely to go through a reorganization to better reflect the line of business. There’s been a hiring freeze all year to allow the bank time to make necessary cuts. Once the bank has an idea of it’s going forward approach audit will realign then hire or cut as needed. My guess is if there are cuts they won’t be too deep since laying off your third line of defense definitely raises eyebrows to investors and more importantly regulators

I have it on good authority that Internal Audit will have some pretty deep cuts. Initially planned for Q4. Then many more cuts in 2021.

I’m in Audit and I don’t have any information but it definitely doesn’t feel safe. We haven’t heard from Julie in awhile. Makes me wonder if she’s leaving.

How many check the checkers who's check the checking do we need???

Nobody is safe this time around.

WF has an Internal Audit function? I learn something every day.