Wells Fargo fires more than 100 employees for improperly drawing on COVID-19 aid funds.

According to a source familiar with the matter, Wells Fargo & Co has laid off around 100 to 125 employees for unethically resorting to coronavirus relief funds.

The bank believes some of its employees “gave false information when they applied for coronavirus aid on their own” and defrauded the US Small Business Administration, David Galloreese, head of human resources, in an internal Reuters memo .

It comes a month after JPMorgan Chase & Co laid off several employees who allegedly misused funds designed to help companies cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, the Financial Times reported.

About 500 applied for the loans, but dozen illegally did so.

The abuse has been linked to the EIDL (Economic Injury Disaster Loan) program, which is conducted directly with the individual and the SBA.

The Paycheck Protection Program, on the other hand, is processed through a bank.

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Wells Fargo employees’ communications with the SBA took place outside of their functions at the bank, the memo said. Wells Fargo will work fully with law enforcement agencies.

“These wrongful acts were personal and do not affect our customers,” the memo continued, adding that the company “has no tolerance for fraudulent behavior”.

Galloreese wrote that they continue to “deal with these matters” and “if we discover additional misconduct by employees we will take appropriate action”.

Bloomberg first reported the news earlier in the day.

The SBA had asked banks to investigate suspicious activity by their customers, including their own employees, as their inspector general found $ 250 million in ineligible payments and $ 45.6 million in duplicate payments.

It is widely believed that the SBA has been scammed across industries as well, but unlike other companies, banks can check to see if their employees have deposited money from the SBA into their accounts.

Bloomberg Business Week reported in August that $ 1.3 billion of the funds may not have been used properly. The focus of the reviews was on $ 10,000 non-repayable advances.

It’s another scandal for Wells Fargo that was the subject of a cross-sell scam in 2016 in which employees pressured to meet goals opened millions of fraudulent savings and checking accounts with the knowledge of their customers.

You settled a class action lawsuit for $ 110 million in January 2017. However, another scandal erupted in June of this year, accusing the bank of having modified loans so customers had to repay more than agreed.

In the months that followed, they charged 570,000 customers who didn’t need them with auto insurance, overburdened small businesses with credit, falsely fined mortgage customers, took back cars, and sold dangerous investments to broker customers.

The Federal Reserve said the bank would not be allowed to increase its wealth until it cleared its act, so Wells Fargo revamped its board of directors in 2018.

It was reported today that JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Bank of America partially recovered their third quarter earnings from the depths of the coronavirus-induced recession earlier this year.

The turnaround is largely due to improvements in the U.S. economy that allowed these big banks to allocate less money to cover potentially non-performing loans – $ 5 billion in the third quarter versus $ 33 billion in the second quarter.

“Right now, it’s the same story for every bank in the industry: Lower borrowing costs help restore profitability,” said Kyle Sanders, an analyst who covers the financial services industry for Edward Jones.

The banks have benefited from massive government incentives to keep the US economy alive.

The banks received fees to implement the government’s paycheck protection program, a $ 669 billion program that gave small businesses unsuccessful loans so they could keep paying their employees.

Individual Americans were given $ 1,200 stimulus checks that researchers could use to either pay off debts or prop up savings.

In addition, Congress and financial regulators have allowed banks to allow mortgage borrowers to indulge in payment for up to a year without having to list those loans as bad on their balance sheets.

In addition to the incentives, banks have entered this pandemic, the healthiest in years and certainly healthier than it was before the 2008 financial crisis.

Capital levels were at historic highs, allowing banks to buy back shares and raise dividends as soon as they could return excess capital to shareholders.

At the moment, banks seem to either believe the worst is over or are reluctant to post additional losses.

JPMorgan provided $ 611 million to cover potentially bad loans in the third quarter, a fraction of the $ 10.47 billion the bank allocated to cover bad loans in the second quarter.

On Wednesday, Bank of America announced it had allocated $ 1.4 billion to cover potentially non-performing loans, far less than the $ 5.1 billion it has allocated

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