The bank has had its fair share of controversies over the past year.

Wells Fargo & Company has made several changes to its board of directors as the firm looks to move on from problems that have hit the company over the past year.

The board of directors have appointed Elizabeth Duke to succeed Stephen Sanger as independent chair, effective January 1, 2018. Sanger will step down at the end of 2017. He will assist the transition until his retirement, the firm said in a statement.

Duke served as a member of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve System from August 2008 to August 2013, where she was chair of the Federal Reserve’s committee on consumer and community affairs and a member of its committee on bank supervision and regulation, committee on bank affairs, and committee on board affairs.

The firm has also appointed Juan Pujadas, a retired principal of PricewaterhouseCoopers, as a new independent director, effective September 1, 2017. Among many senior positions at PwC, Pujadas was vice chairman of global advisory services of PwC International, led the US firm’s advisory practice, and led PwC’s global risk management solutions practice for the Americas.

Also, the firm has said that Cynthia Milligan, who joined in 1992, and Susan Swenson, who joined in 1998, will retire from the board at year-end 2017.

Wells Fargo added: “The board expects to name up to three additional independent directors before the 2018 annual meeting. The board intends to continue adding new directors while maintaining an appropriate balance of experience and perspectives on the board. Although the board’s size may fluctuate in the near term as it recruits new directors, the board expects that its size will move over time toward the lower end of its recent historical range of 14 to 16 directors.”

These appointments come after the appointments earlier this year of two new independent directors, Karen Peetz and Ronald Sargent. 

The firm also made several changes to the leadership and composition of key board committees. The changes, effective September 1, 2017, include: - Risk Committee: Peetz will join and succeed Enrique Hernandez as chair of the risk committee. Pujadas and Suzanne Vautrinot also were added as new members, while Lloyd Dean, Milligan, Federico Peña, and Sanger are rotating off of the risk committee.

- Governance and Nominating Committee (GNC): Donald James will join and succeed Sanger as chair of the GNC. Duke also was added as a new member, and Milligan, Sanger and Swenson are rotating off of the GNC. 

- Corporate Responsibility Committee (CRC): Vautrinot was added as a new member of the CRC. 

- Audit & Examination (A&E) Committee: Sargent was added as a new member of the A&E Committee, while Vautrinot is rotating off given her appointment to the risk committee and the CRC. 

These changes come after this publication reported in July that Wells Fargo was taking legal action to take back data mistakenly given to a lawyer, responding to a story saying information from thousands of clients, some of them wealthy, had been disseminated. Also, Family Wealth Report also reported in May that Wells Fargo had put its Chicago private banking office head and two senior executives on leave pending an internal investigation. In October 2016, this publication also reported it had been embroiled in a scandal in which employees created illegal accounts to achieve sales targets.