Have anyone seen employees being fired for applying for eidl or ppp?
Heard through the grapevine a member of the store fired because they applied for it and they didn’t have a business ? Also heard it from other managers it’s happened.
Seems real sketchy and petty the bank is going into team members and questioning them if they got the loan or grant.
Seems like one more thing the bank can get possibly in legal trouble about.
What really is of interest to WF is how the funds were spent.
I work in Small Business Underwriting for WFB. I reviewed documents and approved or declined PPP loans. Customers had to have WFB Business Checking accounts open for their business since March 14, 2020. Then they had to provide payroll documents (form 940, or 941 or 944's) or if they were a sole prop, 2019 Sch C's. It would be very hard for someone spur of the moment to decide to commit numerous levels of fraud to get these loans. I'm sure it happened. I believe other banks had different requirements because I would see businesses get declined by WFB and then get approved somewhere else.
There was a big push recently to identify these cases ar WF. I imagine JPMC getting caught with their pants down infront of the world had alot of banks do proactive self identification in the last couple weeks.
There is a huge pipeline of these EIDL and PPP cases and not enough WF investigators.. . if you took out these loans under sketchy circumstances i can promise you are on the radar at WF.
when you look into these loans, the first thing we would do is confirm the business info the application is for. every company has to file as a dba or llc for example with the secretary of state or AG’s office. The very first step is check out the app versus/against the company. Then if no company exists....ok, who completed this app? Ok, now who are these people? oh wait, this is an employee. hmmm
guys, even charlie schaffs family is on a list somewhere to keep insider trading, benefits, preferential treatment, etc from happening where they shouldnt. Someone followed the trail and made their way to the branch. That isnt sketchy. Applying for a loan you have no business applying for when you should know better and work here is a violation of our internal code IF they find out that you lied or exaggerated.
I investigate these PPP Fraud cases within Financial Crimes Investigations. I can assure you they have no way of even sorting out who has received them, and that there are actual, real deal criminals getting huge EID loans and grants, half the time in their own name or someone else's, into their own personal accounts while they have no businesses with us or elsewhere.
We are only catching them incidentally from a random branch teller noticing it and reporting it, or say if there's related activity that would be caught by a monitoring algorithm (ie withdrawing the full grant in cash causing a spike in the pattern). There is no verification whatsoever happening on our end, and they do not seem to have any ongoing ability to find the credits.
It's an unmitigated disaster. I'm not even a fraud investigator, I'm in AML-that's how unable they are to deal with it.
And the kicker? We're not even kicking these people out. They're all still customers. So to answer your question I really would not worry lol
Great point, probably got caught in broader monitoring for fraud – not monitoring specifically targeting employees.
I'm sure team members have a flag internally on apps. Guessing they lied and made up their business info and it was picked up as fraud. Assuming that's the case then they deserved to be investigated.
And seriously, looking at our accounts to determine who to be tid of? There's not enough "analysts" in the world to do that before layoffs start hitting hard.
My money says someone was stupid, bragged about it, got reported or flagged, and got walked.
My question is how would they know if the person has a business or not? How were they given this information ?
What if they investigated a peros. Who recieved the funds yet are legitimate business ? Seems sketchy they are checking peoples accounts.
In general and not specific to WF....there are allegations that lots of people applied and received funds from these programs when they were not warranted and in some cases misapplied funds as ppp is intended for payroll only and not to build a bar in your restaurant, for example.
There are active investigations into this by government agencies. What the status of that research is and who may be questioned about it is protected legal information you are not entitled to but if you are in a retail location and heard you/TMs could be questioned then that’s likely.
These claims have to be looked into and are not petty.
Don't get it. If they don't have a business then why would they be applying for either of these business loans? Some bad actors out there are committing PPP fraud, so I can understand why WF would need to watch out for it internally.