I opened an Estate Account with Wells Fargo only to find out after-the-fact that the documentation I provided did not meet their criteria. Specifically, they require a "short certificate" which was not required of me to open the account. They had originally accepted all of the other documentation I produced as sufficient to open the account. They closed the account and issued a counter check for the amount of the original deposits, citing only "inadequate identification documents", for which it took several phone calls and emails to confirm exactly what it was they were lacking.
Then a different branch in another state (I was unsure if this was a state-by-state requirement or a particular bank requirement) consulted with the WF legal department and indicated that an alternate document from my attorney stating a, b, c, etc. Would suffice to reopen the account. When I paid my attorney to generate this document, the WF legal department suddenly decided that this would not suffice after all. The bank offered to reissue the check to my father's Trust account.
When I gave them the go-ahead to reissue the check to the trust account, their legal department decided that WF did not have the authority to reissue an estate check to a trust and advised me to get an attorney. At this point they refused to provide any of this direction in writing and would only read the script to me over the phone.
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