(Reuters) – Wells Fargo & Co said on Tuesday it would commission a third-party racial equity audit that will include inputs from both internal and external stakeholders, as the bank pushes to boost its diversity credentials.
The assessment will be conducted by law firm Covington & Burling LLP, with the results expected to be published by the end of 2023.
The move comes after Wells in June froze its hiring policy that requires recruiters to interview a diverse pool of candidates, after the New York Times reported that such interviews were often fake and conducted even though the job had already been promised to someone else.
At the time, Chief Executive Officer Charles Scharf told staff in a memo that the lender also plans to conduct a review of its diverse slate guidelines.
In August, Wells reinstated the policy, saying it had completed a review of diverse candidate hiring approaches and interviewed recruiters and managers to improve implementation of guidelines.
(Reporting by Manya Saini in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel)
