Business Ethics Case Study: Wells Fargo Formula Of Humanity

This practice was so common that Wells Fargo employees had several methods for doing this. The first method is sand bagging. Sand Bagging involves failing to open accounts by customers at their requested date, instead accumulating accounts to open in the next sales period to inflate profits. Another practice was called Pinning which was creating pin numbers without customer’s authorization, and attaching them to credit cards. Then employees would impersonate customers on Wells Fargo’s computers and use these pin numbers to create online banking and bills for customers. Finally, a practice called bundling was done where Wells Fargo employees would mislead customers saying that certain banking products were only available in bundles which forced customers to add more products than they wanted.

On September 8 2016, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFBP) announced that it was taking an enforcement action against Wells Fargo Bank . Wells Fargo is a Fortune 100 company and one of the "Big Four Banks" of the United States. Investigations conducted by the Bureau revealed that employees of the bank created unauthorized deposit and credit card accounts across the country to meet sales goals. Over the years, the bank’s employees opened over 1.5 million fraudulent bank accounts and 0.5 million fake credit card accounts for customers, to meet sales targets and obtain bonuses. The affected consumers, were being harmed by the associated charges and fees for these accounts. The fees include insufficient funds or overdraft fees for the deposit accounts and annual fees for credit card accounts.

Wells Fargo has a social responsibility to its customers to fulfill their economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic needs. The scandal has presented numerous legal issues. It was negligent of the bank's executives and managers by placing impossible sales goals on lower level employees then encouraging, and pressuring them to meet these goals. The use of customer's information for fraudulent purposes was an invasion of customers privacy. Wells Fargo has violated the Federal Trade Commission Act which protects customers from unfair practices and has also violated the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (Thorne, 2011).

(2)Since 2011, Wells Fargo’s employees have been secretly creating millions of unauthorized bank and credit card accounts, and some Wells Fargo employees even created fake Personal Identification Numbers (PIN) as well as fake email addresses to give the illusion of a growing customer base. The fake accounts earned the bank unwarranted excess fees, which led to increased sales figures. Everyone who had a legit account with Wells Fargo and the people who owned stocks in Wells Fargo were affected. Richard Cordray, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said, “Wells Fargo employees secretly opened unauthorized accounts to hit sales targets and receive bonuses" (Cordray, 2016). The unethical behavior led to the termination of about 5,300 employees, and eventually Wells Fargo had to pay over $185 million dollars in fines, plus an additional $5 million to each affected customer.

The first stated values, states that Wells Fargo’s value open, honest and two communication, which did open a hotline dealing after the scandal and handle the customer service. Though, I would not consider that company honest, but maybe openness after the fact. The second state values is based on accountable and proud of their conduct and decision dealing with Wells Fargo’s. Though, Wells Fargo is unethical in it business practices still used well known business practices and process to motivate salespeople open multiple accounts without the customer permission. Such as training employee in techniques into frauding customers and a system of rewarding for such behavior. Which shows a totally disregard for the customer financial well being

The problem to be investigated is the application of business ethics. In the business world, ethics are extremely important. Ethics are prime elements that help a business to grow and to become more productive. It is by applying proper business ethics that a business can operate in a moral or ethical business environment and managed to conduct all activities in a manner that maximizes profits while not compromising all other non-economic concerns(Schwab, 1996). Businesses have over the years failed to nurture business ethics in order to fulfill shareholders' interests and to have a culture that is oriented towards profit maximization and high performance(Jennings, 2012; Sims & Felton, 2006). This has led business to have gray areas in their activities. Gray areas are those situations or problems that do not fit exactly into any ethical analysis. These are the activities which may be represented to be immoral as a result of lying and false representations on the part of the business.

About 2009, Wells Fargo came up with a plan to dump unwanted bank products on their depositers.They set "sales quotas" on their employees, and if these quota were not met, employees were fired. The bank set up over a half million credit card accounts to unsupecting costomers of their bank. Extra debit cards were issued and costumers money was moved from one account to bogus account that the bank set up. All the time, Wells Fargo collected a fee for these bogous transactions, from their depositors. Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf assured Senator's that he and other top bosses knew nothing about this mass breach of the bank's code of ethics. He then went on to blame low-level employees. CEO John Stumpf kept blaming his $12-an-hour employees for this bank-run swindle of depositors money. Stumpf had a bunch of $12 dollar an hour and mid-level managers fired to back up his claim. Some of the fired employees aked, "what about all those calls that we made to your "ethics hotline" telling you about this fraud. Elizabeth WARREN has chastised WELLS FARGO'S CEO, saying "You should be criminally investigated". She continues with the following statements during Senate hearings into the matter, here are some

This practice was so common that Wells Fargo employees had several methods for doing this. The first method is sand bagging. Sand Bagging involves failing to open accounts by customers at their requested date, instead accumulating accounts to open in the next sales period to inflate profits. Another practice was called Pinning which was creating pin numbers without customer’s authorization, and attaching them to credit cards. Then employees would impersonate customers on Wells Fargo’s computers and use these pin numbers to create online banking and bills for customers. Finally, a practice called bundling was done where Wells Fargo employees would mislead customers saying that certain banking products were only available in bundles which forced customers to add more products than they wanted.

On Thursday, September 8, 2016, federal regulators found that over two million fake accounts were created in a scam from Wells Fargo (Dugan). According to the New York Post, it has just been discovered that the Wells Fargo former senior executive vice president, Carrie Tolstedt, is linked to the scamming of Wells Fargo customers (Report). The many other employees were fired since the scam was discovered in 2011, however, according to the New York Post, Tolstedt was praised by Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf, allowed to leave, and not lose any of her compensation (Report). This incident was highly unethical and resulted in customers and employees losing their trust in Wells Fargo.

There was a dismissal of 5,300 employees and $185 million in fines against Wells Fargo (Stewart, 2017). The bank’s pressure-cooker sales environment made a toxic sales culture. Wells Fargo held unrealistic sale quotas to its employees and held policies that drove employees to participate in illegal behaviors to meet unreachable goals. Employees opened millions of unauthorized credit cards and deposit accounts, fees and other charges were racked up, money was transferred from customers’ accounts without their knowledge and their permission, they also created phony email addresses to enroll customers in online banking services, all to hit sale targets and receive bonuses. Employees who called attention to the abusive, fraudulent behaviors were ignored and wrongfully terminated and retaliated

(Exploring Management) They want to make their goals, but they know that the goal is set way too high to anywhere within reason. So many of the Wells Fargo branches did their best to keep up with the sales quota. So, to keep up they created the fraudulent bank accounts to appease their bosses. When it seemed that most of the employees were doing what they could to meet the quota, others knew of the unethical behavior and did not want to stand for it. So, they called Wells Fargo’s ethics hotline to report the fraud and poor treatment. It did not go as the employees had thought it would. “One former Wells Fargo HR official said the bank had a method in place to retaliate against tipsters.” (Egan, Matt) So, thus many employees lost their jobs reporting the unethical behavior and unethical sales practices. One horrible case of that included Bill Bado, “Bado refused to open fake accounts. Sent emails and called the ethics hotline to bring the issue to light as was part of his job and was fired eight days after he sent the email. For supposed tardiness.” (Egan, Matt) One from one ethical failure to another. You had Managers calling for unreasonable sales quotas, so then you had branch employees open fraudulent accounts, which in turn had ethical employees trying to blow the whistle at all the bad behavior only to be fired in return for doing the right

Scandals in the business world are not an uncommon topic to appear in new headlines. Recently Wells Fargo has fired over 5,000 employees for creating over 2 million fake accounts. New bank and credit card accounts were created without prior knowledge from their customers. The accounts that were created resulted in those customers inquiring fees such as overdraft fees. These fake accounts have been created over a five-year timeframe.

Hiding or divulging information: Goldman bet against their clients several times. They knew material information on certain investment; however, they never communicated that to their clients because they were making money off them.

Business ethics refers to the consideration of moral decisions and responsibilities in the process of operating a business. Business ethics, practiced throughout the deepest layers of a company, become the heart and soul of the company 's culture and can mean the difference between success and failure. Values drive behavior and therefore need to be consciously stated, but they also need to be affirmed by actions. Ethical business environments are created with foundations of integrity, accountability and commitment.

Bank of America is one of the largest banks in the nation. It is a multinational company and it is recognized by its high revenue value. Unfortunately, Bank of America has endured many complaints and harsh views regarding their lack of ethics. Ethical issues occur when there is a blatant disregard to implement integrity, trust, and responsibility. In some financial institutions, ethical matters are displayed in the way the consumers are treated. Within the past nine years, Bank of America has diminished all of their ethical promises by revealing customer information without their permission; discriminating against consumers based on their race; and manipulating overdraft fees in order to benefit the bank. In order to assess these problems, it is vital to recognize what Bank of America claims to stand for and determine where their most concerning issues are generated from.