Wells Fargo, Awash in Scandal, Faces Violations Over Car Insurance Refunds

Wells Fargo, the scandal-plagued bank, is facing new regulatory scrutiny for not refunding insurance money owed to people who paid off their car loans early, according to people briefed on the inquiry.

Just last month Wells Fargo was found to have forced unneeded collision insurance on consumers who financed their car purchases. That practice, first disclosed by The New York Times, affected 800,000 customers according to an analysis commissioned by the bank. Some 274,000 people were pushed into delinquency as a result, and 25,000 cars were wrongly repossessed.

The latest inquiry, by officials at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, where the bank has its headquarters, involves a different, specialized type of insurance that is sold to consumers when they buy a car. Called guaranteed auto protection insurance, or GAP, it is intended to protect a lender against the fact that a car — the collateral for its loan — loses significant value the moment it is driven off the lot.

GAP insurance, also known as guaranteed asset protection, makes up that difference for a lender if, for instance, a car is stolen before the loan is paid off. Regular car insurance typically covers only the current market value.

Because Wells Fargo is a large auto lender, tens of thousands of customers may have been affected by the bank’s actions on GAP insurance.

It is not mandatory for car buyers to carry GAP insurance, which typically costs $400 to $600. But car dealers push the insurance, and lenders like it because of the protection it provides. When borrowers pay off the loans early, they are entitled to a refund of some of the GAP insurance premium because the coverage they paid for is no longer needed.

Laws in nine states require that customers get unused insurance money back. They are Alabama, Colorado, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Oregon and South Carolina.

Jennifer A. Temple, a Wells Fargo spokeswoman, provided a statement saying: “During an internal review, we discovered issues related to a lack of oversight and controls surrounding the administration of Guaranteed Asset Protection products. We are reviewing our practices and actively working with our dealers and have already begun making improvements to the GAP refund process. If we find customer impacts, we will make customers whole.”

Ms. Temple declined to say when the problem began. She said the bank was trying to assess how many customers had been affected. Wells Fargo improved controls on the refund process in 2014, she said. The unit of the bank that makes car loans is called Wells Fargo Dealer Services.

Asked about the regulatory inquiry into GAP insurance at Wells Fargo, Darren Gersh, a spokesman for the Federal Reserve Board in Washington said, “We are focused on ensuring that the root causes of a firm’s compliance and controls breakdowns are understood and addressed.” He declined to comment on the specifics, adding that “the Federal Reserve Board will take any regulatory and supervisory steps we feel are necessary to ensure the firm’s attention to compliance.”

A failure to refund the insurance money harmed borrowers whose cars were repossessed by increasing what they owed, a figure that the bank reports to consumer credit bureaus. All 50 states require that the amount of unused insurance be credited to those borrowers’ accounts, reducing the amount owed.