Wells Fargo review: Checking and savings accounts

I have 2 younger sisters, age 57 and 67, while I am 77. My oldest sister is in hospice and is not expected to live for more than a few months. She is mentally competent but can’t get out of bed. She has always cared for her younger sister, who is mentally severely disabled and in Conservatorship, and now is in a board and care as she has Alzheimers and requires 24/7 care. I have been added to the conservatorship as co-Conservator so that I can take over caring for my yougest sister, paying her rent, etc.

My wife and I went to our local Wells Fargo branch, where we have been customers for about 50 years, and they have been incredibly unhelpful and incompetent in getting me added to both sisters accounts. They said I needed a POA (a Durable Power of Attorney)to do this, even though for the younger one my documentation as Conservator makes a POA redundant and unnecessary, as my oldest sister and I are the only ones who could sign a POA, given that my youngest sister is unable to read or write, or comprehend what is going on.

So we went ahead and had the 2 POA documents drawn up and brought them to Wells Fargo. The banker there submitted the documents to their compliance people who declared that there were 2 problems. One was that the younger sister needed to sign the POA, despite that being impossible and unneccessary. As Conservator I or my oldest sister would sign any and all documents for her. Second, they said that because the older sister’s accounts were in her Trust (and I am the successor Trustee of that)she needed to sign as Trustee, which actually made sense, and so we redid her POA and she signed it as Trustee. We also referenced in her revised POA document the specific Wells savings and checking accounts by account number and name, and enumerated the powers the POA would confer to me to do essentially anything with the accounts.I also did a POA for my younger sister and both my older sister and I signed it as Co-Conservators.

The senior Wells branch banker thought this was more than adequate, but when he faxed the documents to the compliance people they said no go, but would not explain why. They said they would contact the banker and us within 2 business days to let us know what the issues were. By this point we had been at the bank for over 4 hours over 2 days, The branch banker was clearly distressed and tried mightily to get the compliance people to accept the paperwork as is, but they refused, and did not appear to really understand the legal issues at all. They also refused to allow him to talk directly to the legal department. He was very upset and apologetic to us.

It was more than 10 days before we heard back. The “explanation” was that the papers were “unacceptable”, but no reason was given and no guidance as to how to make them acceptable.My older sister is asking her attorney what we can do about all this, but we are very unhappy with how the bank is handling this matter.

In the meanwhile my wife and I, totally disgusted, are moving our personal accounts to another bank. The main reason we don’t do that with the sisters accounts is due to Social Security doing direct pay into both of their bank accounts, so changing banks could get quite messy and take a long time.But neither we or anyone we know will do business with Wells Fargo in the future if we can avoid it.