The head of the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration, Frank Bisignano, has touted a record as a Wall Street fix-it man in his attempts to overhaul those two government agencies.
The Wall Street Journal on Monday reported on his time as an executive at JPMorgan Chase, where colleagues came to believe and then found evidence he had been using his position to spy on them.
Here are the takeaways from the investigation:
Who is Frank Bisignano?
The son of a customs officer at Port Newark, Brooklyn-raised Bisignano was a rising star at Citigroup in the 1980s and '90s. As deputy head of technology and operations in 2001, 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.
Jamie Dimon recruited him to come to JPMorgan as chief administrative officer, and he was later given the task of running the bank's mortgage department. He was named co-chief operating officer in 2012 to help clean up the London Whale trading losses.
Bisignano left JPMorgan in 2013 to be chief executive of First Data, a payments-processing company that KKR had bought before the financial crisis. Bisignano helped turn around First Data and took the company public in 2015. In 2019, First Data merged with Fiserv.
President Trump picked Bisignano to be the chief of the Social Security Administration, the government retirement system, a position he took last year. He was later additionally appointed to the new position of CEO of the IRS. Last Wednesday, Bisignano also took charge of the implementation of Trump Accounts, the tax-deferred retirement accounts for children.
Departure from JPMorgan
Inside JPMorgan, 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 who felt Bisignano was trying to undermine them to add to his own power in the bank, often disparaging their activities to Dimon without confronting them directly, 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.
Courtney Forrest, a lawyer for Bisignano, said JPMorgan's internal culture encouraged a "direct, sometimes uncomfortable management style."
Forrest said that "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."
Evidence of spying
At JPMorgan, Bisignano directed his security staff to use software to snoop in the email of rival executives, people familiar with the matter said. One executive said he suspected the spying and put a code phrase in his email, which he said Bisignano repeated back to him.
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 COO, 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.
Forrest, the lawyer, said Bisignano 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 it was false "that an executive planted a code word to catch" Bisignano reading the email.
Fiserv's guidance cuts
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, Fiserv and his successor CEO, Mike Lyons.
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 Lyons.
Write to Alexander Saeedy at alexander.saeedy@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 23, 2026 13:16 ET (17:16 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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