Bank worker gets the boot for 50-year-old petty crime
Aug 30, 2012, 12:56 PM | Updated: Oct 11, 2024, 1:09 pm
Banks are supposed to be under strict rules to prevent another meltdown like the crash of 2008, but the regulators probably didn’t have a guy like Richard Eggers in mind when they passed some of the new provisions.
Eggers lost his job in July as a customer service representative with Wells Fargo in Des Moines, Iowa because he has a criminal past. It’s not much of one.
“It was laughably minor,” says the Vietnam vet in an interview with Ross and Burbank.
Eggers got busted back in 1963 for putting a cardboard cutout of a dime in a washing machine at a local laundromat.
Fast forward nearly 50 years. Eggers got called into his supervisor’s office and was fired. He was caught up in tougher standards requiring financial institutions to weed out executives and mid-level employees guilty of financial crimes. Eggert did the crime, now he has to pay the price.
“They just told me that due to this criminal record in my past I was not qualified to work for Wells Fargo. I considered it to be nonsense then, I consider it to be nonsense now,” says the 68-year-old who was making $29,000 a year.
The damage is done. Eggers can appeal to the FDIC, but he won’t be getting help any time soon.
“The process takes 6-8 months so it’ll be next spring or summer before I hear from them anyway.”
In the meantime, Eggers is trying to get a job anywhere he can.
“The problem is you have to put down why did you leave your former employer and there’s nothing else I can put down,” Eggers says.
“Just put down BS,” says co-host Luke Burbank.
Eggers says most frustrating is how many lower-tier workers like him got caught up in the crackdown. He says while thousands were shown the door, Wells Fargo filed waivers and saved the jobs of scores of managers at the same time.
“They are playing pretty fast and loose with people’s careers and lives for no good reason. I think they could have retained most of us.”
