Wells Fargo reports that it has found evidence that the bank retaliated against workers who raised questions about aggressive sales tactics and illegal account openings that lead to its ongoing fake accounts scandal.

"Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan said last week in a town hall meeting that the bank has reviewed all reports made by its employees to the confidential ethics line over the past 5 years where the callers identified themselves. That was roughly 40% of callers to the hotline," CNN Money reports."Wells Fargo hired an unnamed 3rd party to look into cases where employees were terminated within 12 months of calling the ethics line."

"A few cases out of the hundreds reviewed raised questions, and we are following up on each of them," Sloan said in a companywide address last week. [Bold emphasis provided by financialish.com]

When asked by CNN if that statement meant the bank had found retaliation had happened, a spokesperson for the bank said, "Yes, that is how I would read it. Where we have cause for concern, we're going to keep looking further."

“This group will be tasked with ensuring a consistent process for identifying, assessing, investigating, correcting and reporting on practices that do not align with our expectations for high ethical standards and excellence in risk management,” Sloan said during that same address. Any action to identify, assess, investigate, correct and report on retaliatory practices may have come too late for some current and former employees of the bank, however.

CNN reports that dozens of workers who were penalized or terminated for speaking out about the aggressive and illegal sales tactics contacted the news agency to detail how the bank had retaliated against them. Bill Bado, a former Wells Fargo banker in Pennsylvania, recounted his call to the ethics hotline about being instructed to open phony bank and credit accounts. Bado even provided a September 2013 email to HR flagging these concerns. Eight days after sending the email, Bado was terminated - for tardiness," CNN reports.

• "The firing also put a stain on Bado's securities license, and he found he couldn't get hired in the industry. Bado's financial troubles worsened after that. His house was on the verge of being foreclosed on and he worked part-time at the grocery store chain Shop-Rite."
• "They ruined my life," Bado told CNNMoney.