Well at least one thing went right last week for Wells CEO John Stumpf at the House Financial Services Committee hearing - they didn't ask any questions about Wells Fargo Advisors, the retail brokerage division.  Apparently, the investment professionals associated with the B/D have been accused of some not-so-customer-friendly practices of their own.

Earlier this year, professors from the University of Minnesota and the University of Chicago released a study that analyzed disciplinary information on more than 1 million current and former brokers.  In a breakdown of 100 firms that had at least 1,000 brokers, the Wells Fargo Financial Network ranked 3rd-worst for employing brokers with a record of misconduct. The study said that 15% of the network's advisers had misconduct on their records, compared to an average 7% misconduct rate among all firms in the study.

The Financial Network, known as FiNet, is a Wells operation set up for independent brokers. Although they are not Wells employees, the bank holds the FINRA licenses for the 1,370 brokers in the group and oversees their compliance with regulatory rules.

The FiNet brokers also did badly in a 2nd study released in April by Securities Litigation & Consulting Group of Fairfax, VA, that provides expert witness services in litigation.  Among 210 firms that had 400 or more brokers, FiNet ranked 16th for "investor harm." And Wells Fargo Advisors, the network of in-house brokers, ranked 24th-worst among the 210 firms.

If you tally up brokers at FiNet, brokers directly employed by Wells Fargo Advisors, and people with FINRA licenses who work in bank branches, Wells has 18,942 people licensed to sell investments to the public.  And according to Susan Antilla of TheStreet.com, FINRA records indicate that some of those licensed bank employees have been fired over the past 4 years for infractions that mirror the behavior described by the Consumer Financial Protection Board.