JPMorgan Chase Bank Wrongly Charged 170,000 Customers Overdraft Fees. Federal Regulators Refused to Penalize It – By Patrick Rucker (The Capitol Forum) / Dec 14 2020
Documents and records show that bank examiners have avoided penalizing at least six banks that incorrectly charged overdraft and related fees to hundreds of thousands of customers.
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This story was co-published with The Capitol Forum.
Federal bank examiners considered levying fines and sanctions when JPMorgan Chase informed them last year that faulty overdraft charges caused by a software glitch had impacted roughly 170,000 customers.
But the bank urged the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, or OCC, its chief regulator, to take less severe action, according to two people directly involved in the probe and internal documents reviewed by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum.
Rather than openly penalizing Chase, the nation’s largest bank, OCC officials decided to issue a quiet reprimand — a supervisory letter — that would go into the bank’s file and stay out of public view, according to the people and regulatory paperwork.
The agency’s deputy chief counsel, Bao Nguyen, approved the supervisory letter in June and accepted Chase’s explanation of the incident and its promise to repay its customers, according to the people and regulatory paperwork.
