"There are three categories of Trump failures: disasters of mismanagement, disasters by design and disasters of greed."
Trump is caught in the trap he set: His mantra is to accuse others of doing what he is doing. Accordingly, I think that HE, along with Right wing Confederates has stolen the 2024 election.
As head of the IRS and Social Security Administration, Frank Bisignano is entrusted with the private financial records of every American taxpayer. But before entering public service, he spied on his colleagues at JPMorgan Chase. While co-COO at the bank, Bisignano directed staff to snoop on rival executives, people familiar with the matter told the Journal. Bisignano denies spying on co-workers. Still, our reporting details how he ultimately lost the trust of CEO Jamie Dimon.
Frank Bisignano directed staff to use software to snoop in email of rivals and surveil work of employees; Bisignano, who also is the chief of Social Security, denied he ever spied on co-workers
Alexander Saeedy covers banking and finance for The Wall Street Journal. Previously, he covered financially distressed companies and bankruptcy. On the banking beat, he has
Frank Bisignano, the head of the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration, sits atop two government organizations that store vast reams of sensitive financial data about every taxpayer.
More than a decade ago, he was co-chief operating officer at JPMorgan ChaseJPM -0.65%, another perch that gave him visibility and authority over every part of a massive financial institution. At the bank, people familiar with the matter said, he spied on fellow executives—using his authority over the security department and position to access sensitive information and internal communications without an apparent business justification.
The executive directed his security staff to use software to snoop in the email of rival executives—including Charlie Scharf, JPMorgan’s then head of consumer banking who is now the CEO of Wells Fargo, some of the people said. One executive said he suspected the spying and put a code phrase in his email, which he said Bisignano repeated back to him.
Bisignano also accessed a draft complaint from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission about a questioned derivatives trade that was a confidential document only seen by a few members of the legal department, some said. He also directed his staff to use software to surveil the work of employees, sometimes seeking to track keystrokes—which can show draft versions of written material—others said.
The people said Bisignano’s goal was to keep a tight rein on employees and use the information to undermine his rivals as he expanded his responsibilities. No allegations are known to pertain to the improper access of customer information.
Around the end of 2012, following years of complaints about his behavior, including allegations of disrespectful conduct toward colleagues and underlings and of the breaking of company norms around data collection, Chief Executive Jamie Dimon lost trust in him and told Bisignano he would support him finding a job elsewhere, people familiar with the matter said.
Bisignano left the bank to become CEO of First Data, which later merged with FiservFISV 2.07%, a payments company critical to the digital infrastructure used in card transactions and banking.
Courtney Forrest, a lawyer for Bisignano, said in a statement that he never spied on co-workers. She said he “never directed anyone to look through any employee’s or executive’s communications or engaged in any form of surveillance.” She said Bisignano “never accessed a draft FERC complaint,” that he and Scharf “have maintained a strong personal and professional relationship for years” and that it was false “that an executive planted a codeword to catch” Bisignano reading the email.
Forrest said “Dimon never asked, encouraged or suggested that Mr. Bisignano leave JPMorgan” and that Bisignano voluntarily left to become CEO of First Data. She also said “the claim that Mr. Bisignano’s growing responsibilities at JPMorgan were accompanied by a pattern of undermining colleagues is patently untrue and inaccurate.”
After Bisignano left the bank, investigators from the legal department found digital traces of the spying activity, including records that showed email access, some of the people said.
As a result, Matt Zames, who took over as JPMorgan’s sole chief operating officer, increased restrictions on access to sensitive employee information, requiring approval from senior members of the legal department to access emails and other data, some of the people said.
President Trump picked Bisignano to become chief of the Social Security Administration, the government retirement system, and he was confirmed by the Senate last year. His responsibilities were expanded later in the year when he was appointed to the new position of CEO of the IRS, running its daily operations.
Last Wednesday, the Treasury Department announced that Bisignano would take charge of the implementation of Trump Accounts, the tax-deferred retirement accounts for children.
At SSA and IRS, his challenges include modernizing the systems that power the nation’s biggest benefit agency and tax collection authority, both of which still rely on technology that is more than 20 years old. At the IRS, which has rotated through a half-dozen leaders during the Trump administration, Bisignano is also tasked with enforcing the tax law with a smaller staff.
Trump has complained that the IRS was weaponized against him by political enemies. In May, Bisignano agreed to settle a lawsuit Trump brought against the agency for the 2019 leak of his tax returns that included an unprecedented agreement that the government would never review or audit previous tax filings by Trump, his sons or the Trump Organization, among other actions.
On July 13, Judge Kathleen Williams harshly criticized the agreement, in part because Bisignano is part of the Trump administration. The federal judge said the president and his family acted in bad faith in bringing the $10 billion lawsuit and said it was brought to “manipulate the judicial process.” Her ruling doesn’t alter the no-audit promise, but she said the acquiescence to it by Bisignano and others was “wholly incompatible” with their duties “to enforce the law and protect the public interest.”
A White House spokeswoman said Bisignano “is a trusted and talented member of the President’s team who is doing an incredible job.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Bisignano’s proven executive leadership has improved services at the IRS and eliminated waste. A spokesperson for SSA said Bisignano was transforming the agency to deliver world-class customer service.
A JPMorgan spokesman said Bisignano is distinguished for his grit and determination, and that “we applaud his service to our country both at the Social Security Administration and the IRS.”
At JPMorgan and in his previous role at Citigroup, Bisignano had built a reputation on Wall Street as an administrator and fix-it man, with a track record of turning around businesses. Many of his former staff followed him from JPMorgan to First Data and Fiserv, where he became CEO in 2020, and now to the IRS.
At Fiserv, Bisignano helped grow sales of Clover, a point-of-sale payment terminal for credit-card payments, and consistently delivered revenue and profit growth that made its stock more than double between the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2025.
But months after he left to join the government and had sold nearly all of his Fiserv stock, the firm’s new management threw out the forecasts Bisignano’s team had been giving Wall Street and said they were materially inaccurate, blaming unrealistic growth projections, misleading revenue figures skewed by foreign-currency fluctuations and management decisions to defer investments. The move sent the stock into a tailspin and prompted shareholder lawsuits against Bisignano and Fiserv.
Bisignano’s attorney declined to comment on matters at Fiserv “that are the subject of active litigation” but said the bulk of the decline in its share price occurred under the leadership of his successor as CEO, Mike Lyons.
Bisignano said: “My experience working for leaders such as Jamie Dimon, Sandy Weill, Tony Terracciano, Henry Kravis and Scott Nuttall has prepared me for the privilege of serving the American people.”
Recruited by Dimon
The son of a customs officer at Port Newark, Brooklyn-raised Bisignano was a rising star at Citigroup and its predecessor firms in the 1980s and ’90s. Dimon, who was a top executive there in those years, was impressed by Bisignano’s operational abilities. After Dimon was fired from Citigroup in 1998 and later became CEO of Chicago-based Bank One, he tried and failed to hire Bisignano, people familiar with the matter said.
In 2001, Bisignano’s profile was raised when, as Citi’s deputy head of technology and operations, he helped lead Citi’s response to the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, standing outside Citi’s office a few blocks north and directing employees to safer locations.
After Bank One and JPMorgan merged in 2004, Dimon attracted Bisignano to join with an executive job as chief administrative officer. Bisignano was tasked with tackling complex back-office problems as JPMorgan looked to integrate the multiple companies it had acquired in a short number of years.
In 2011, Dimon named him head of the mortgage department—replacing Scharf—after former Marine Captain Jonathan Rowles testified before Congress about how JPMorgan had illegally foreclosed on his house while he was serving on active duty.
Bisignano overhauled the mortgage staff, doubled the number of borrower-assistance centers and helped launch a coalition of companies committed to hiring veterans. He also spearheaded the bank’s negotiations with the federal government and state attorneys general on mortgage-related lawsuits after the 2008 financial crisis.
He was promoted to co-chief operating officer in 2012, alongside Zames. They shared oversight of compliance-related matters, which had largely been managed by the general counsel’s office at JPMorgan before then. The two effectively split duties, with Bisignano focused more on security matters while Zames was working on financial risk management in the wake of the bank’s $6 billion loss and regulatory scrutiny from the “London Whale” scandal.
As Bisignano took on more responsibility, complaints about his management style and conduct toward other executives and employees grew.
He frequently clashed with some top executives, including Gordon Smith, an executive in the consumer bank, and Todd Maclin, a commercial banker who was assigned to run some of the consumer business in 2011, according to people familiar with the matter. They and other executives felt that Bisignano was trying to undermine them in order to add to his own power in the bank, often disparaging their activities to Dimon without confronting them directly, some of the people said.
Forrest, Bisignano’s attorney, said JPMorgan’s internal culture encouraged a “direct, sometimes uncomfortable management style,” and that Dimon said he wanted executives to “ask hard questions.”
Bisignano demanded his own team pledge loyalty to him directly, people who spoke with him said. He told some of his employees he kept dossiers about them in his desk in case they “went native”—which they took as his way of describing someone who was no longer loyal to him, the people said.
Around 2012, during a biennial employee survey review, which covered workplace issues such as how satisfied employees were with their jobs, Bisignano’s division gave some of the most negative feedback in all of JPMorgan. Bisignano asked his direct reports to go into the survey submission tool and figure out which employees had written negative reviews, some of the people said.
Forrest said Bisignano never maintained a dossier on employees and said it was false that he asked for negative survey responses to be traced back to their authors.
Executives griped to Dimon about what they saw as Bisignano’s use of company resources for his own benefit, including allegations Bisignano misused the corporate jet for personal purposes, people familiar with the matter said.
Some also raised concerns to members of the legal department about preliminary efforts—which didn’t take place—to use JPMorgan resources for the renovation of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan that began in 2011, people familiar with the matter said. Bisignano is one of the cathedral’s trustees, a group that at the time was responsible for raising funds for the historic $175 million renovation.
Some complaints led to internal reviews, which concluded Bisignano hadn’t violated the bank’s rules, some of the people said.
Forrest said it was false that he used the jet for personal purposes and that he didn’t ask JPMorgan for money for the cathedral. Bisignano “never misappropriated corporate funds at JPMorgan, or anywhere else,” she said.
Around 2007, Bisignano asked senior executives to personally look into giving a loan to his friend Bo Dietl, owner of a private security company and prominent New York personality with whom he often dined at the New York restaurant Rao’s, people familiar with the matter said. The move was unusual in that Bisignano had directed executives to handle his friend’s loan application instead of referring him to rank-and-file bankers. The bank didn’t lend Dietl any money after reviewing his application, which upset Bisignano, the people said.
Forrest said Bisignano “knows nothing about any such loan.”
Dietl told The Wall Street Journal he didn’t remember asking for the loan but that Bisignano was a friend and the two did business together while he worked at JPMorgan, including when Dietl sold keystroke capture and encryption software to the bank. He said he also provided a group of former veterans to be security guards for some of the bank’s branches.
Bisignano had good relationships with some executives at JPMorgan, including asset and wealth management chief Mary Erdoes and former chief financial officer Mike Cavanagh, who respected his ambition and ability to get things done, people familiar with the matter said.
Dimon for years dismissed the complaints as run-of-the-mill conflicts between ambitious executives, some of the people said. But by late 2012, he had lost trust in Bisignano after he continued to come into conflict with executives and didn’t demonstrate a willingness to change, and he told Bisignano he would support him finding a job elsewhere, some of the people said.
The chief executive has rarely fired executives who have fallen out of favor during his 20-year career. He has instead typically made clear to people they have no more room to be promoted and urged them to find new jobs.
Dimon said in a memo to employees announcing Bisignano’s departure in 2013 that he was a “capable executive willing to take on the most complex challenges and get the job done.”
Sensitive records
Months after Bisignano left for First Data, forensic investigations found digital footprints that showed Bisignano’s staff had accessed sensitive corporate records and employee communications without a clear business purpose, according to people familiar with the matter.
Around this time, Bisignano’s key deputy handling cybersecurity issues and regulatory inquiries, Peter Cavicchia, was pushed out, people familiar with the matter said. He joined Bisignano at First Data and currently is the chief technology officer at Fiserv.
Federal regulations require banks to keep a broad range of communications, including emails, phone recordings and instant messages, which can be used if necessary for compliance investigations. Regulators often inquire about internal controls on information and have penalized banks when they have found lapses.
Bisignano, who as co-COO had shared oversight of security and compliance functions for JPMorgan, could access these records, and the company at the time didn’t have strict rules requiring approval to access them.
Forrest, the attorney, said Bisignano didn’t “personally access or have access to any individual records.” She said he was “unaware of the specifics of any forensic investigation, subsequent access-control changes or the circumstances” of Cavicchia’s departure.
Investigators from the legal department found Bisignano accessed a draft complaint and inquiry from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission about an energy derivatives trade the bank had made, people familiar with the matter said. The confidential documents had been emailed to individuals in the legal department.
The contents of the documents were reported by the New York Times in 2013, and some executives at JPMorgan said they believed that they were leaked from someone inside the bank.
JPMorgan that year agreed to pay $410 million to settle accusations by the regulator that it manipulated electricity markets, without admitting wrongdoing.
Forrest, in addition to denying Bisignano accessed the FERC complaint, said he “has never leaked anything to the press.”
JPMorgan didn’t prepare a report documenting any investigation into Bisignano’s alleged misconduct, some of the people said.
When he left, the bank didn’t grant Bisignano his unvested shares, people familiar with the matter said.
At the 2013 wedding of Steve Black, a former JPMorgan executive, Dimon asked why other executives had waited so long to tell him their concerns about Bisignano’s behavior, people who heard him said.
‘New York numbers’
After JPMorgan, Bisignano became chief executive of First Data, a payments processing company that KKR had bought with $25 billion of debt before the financial crisis. Executives at KKR weren’t aware of any personnel complaints regarding Bisignano before First Data hired him, people familiar with the matter said.
Forrest said “there were no undisclosed personnel issues to discuss.”
Bisignano ran into problems with his old firm when he recruited a number of JPMorgan executives to join him at First Data, which JPMorgan said violated his separation agreement. To settle the fight, First Data paid JPMorgan roughly $10 million, the Journal previously reported.
Bisignano helped turn around First Data, which had run into trouble not long after the KKR acquisition. He took the company public in 2015.
As the head of First Data, Bisignano invested in Clover, a popular way for merchants to accept credit card payments. In 2019, First Data merged with Fiserv, a payments and tech infrastructure platform for banks that was long loved on Wall Street for being a reliable investment. KKR eventually sold its stake in Fiserv after the merger.
Scott Nuttall, the co-CEO of KKR, said in a statement that “Frank was an outstanding leader” and “delivered one of the most successful transformations in our history.”
In 2020, Bisignano took over the combined company and led a push to get Fiserv’s clients onto Clover. The conversion resulted in one-off fees, and Clover-related revenue growth jumped as high as 30% year-over-year, boosting Fiserv’s performance. Fiserv also imposed new fees on converted Clover customers to help grow revenues further.
Growth projections for Clover prepared in the final years under Bisignano were viewed as unrealistic by some employees, according to people familiar with the matter, one of whom referred to them as “New York numbers,” a reference to the staff far away from Clover’s San Francisco operations. Driven by rosy projections, Fiserv’s stock hit an all-time high in February 2025, when Bisignano told investors that the company was “all gas and no brake.”
Bisignano left Fiserv in May 2025 for the SSA. As part of his compliance with federal conflict of interest rules, Bisignano sold large quantities of Fiserv stock by July 22, 2025, the day before the company reported its second-quarter earnings. That included selling at least $77 million in stock in total on July 21 and July 22, when Fiserv’s current executives were in a blackout period to ensure they weren’t trading on material nonpublic information.
Bisignano wasn’t subject to the blackout rule because he had already resigned, a person familiar with the matter said.
On July 23, Fiserv reported its results. The new CEO, Lyons, said the company expected a slowdown but that it would still meet the lower end of its 10-12% growth projections. The shares fell around 15%.
Then, in October, Lyons made deeper revisions, calling for a “reset” of the company’s forecasts, saying they were “objectively difficult to achieve” and had been skewed by foreign-exchange fluctuations.
The company said around half to two-thirds of Fiserv’s revenue growth in 2023 and 2024 had come from higher transaction values in Argentina, where inflation topped 100% in both years but was now declining. Investors were surprised by this disclosure, with one analyst report from JPMorgan stating the company “had not previously disclosed that Argentina was driving such a large portion of companywide growth.”
The company also said it had scrapped several short-term fees it charged to Clover customers and said deferred investments under past management had limited its ability to earn revenue, after a back-office failure at Fiserv in May resulted in a widespread outage for millions of bank customers at Bank of America, Capital One and other firms. The company spent hundreds of millions of dollars to fix the problems, people familiar with the matter said.
After the reset was announced, the stock fell over 40% as a result, wiping out some $30 billion for investors.
Shareholders sued Bisignano, Lyons and Fiserv, saying the company intentionally presented overinflated forecasts and figures to boost executives’ stock-based compensation. Bisignano earned $21 million from incentive-based compensation in 2024. Lawsuits against them have been consolidated into a class-action case, which is pending in New York federal court. Lyons resigned from his job in June to become the CEO of the Charlotte-headquartered bank Truist.
Forrest, the attorney, declined to comment on matters related to the Fiserv litigation but said “any insinuation that there was a lack of investment in the company is false.” She added: “The story of Fiserv changes dramatically when Mr. Bisignano leaves and Mike Lyons takes over.”
Bisignano still keeps in contact with many current and former leaders at JPMorgan, including Dimon.
In June, Bisignano traveled to the bank’s New York headquarters for a farewell party for Vince La Padula, a JPMorgan banker who has joined the IRS. The party was held at the Patriot’s Bar, a flag-filled watering hole at JPMorgan’s new skyscraper where Dimon has been hosting parties and social gatherings. Bisignano caught up with executives such as Erdoes, but Dimon had left the party by the time Bisignano arrived, people familiar with the matter said.
