Wells Fargo Ethical Decisions 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. According to the New York Post,
Account number ending in 0255. According to James R. Boucher, all of the transactions on June 5 and June 6 were done by the suspect, James Roy Boucher, excluding the transaction on June 5, 2016 at Best Buy Carbondale, IL in the amount of $181.53. That transaction was done by James F. Boucher. I contacted the Wal-Mart store located in Murphysboro on 08/17/2016 via telephone and spoke to Sherry. Sherry stated I had to call back the following day and speak to Jennifer Bell. On Thursday, 08/18/2016, at approximately 1046 hours I arrived at the Murphysboro Wal-Mart and requested to speak to Jennifer Bell. The lady at the customer service desk checked in the Wal-Mart database for all of the transactions on the Discover card statement listed for Murphysboro and Carbondale Wal-Mart. She was not able to locate the matching amounts. She also advised that the security video footage would not be available for June 5 or June 6 because the video recorder recycles after 2 months. On the attached Discover card statement labeled #3, the statement indicated on July 5th, Discover cancelled all transactions charged to the victims account on June 5 and June 6. The victims did not have to pay Discover for those amounts. The victims cancelled their old Discover credit card account and were issued a new
White collar crime costs Americans tax payers an estimated “$300 billion annually” (White-collar Crime), but more importantly hurts millions of American emotionally and financially who put their trust in stock market and financial institutions. Surprisingly, even with the astronomical cost only a few perpetrators are ever indicted and even fewer receive any sort of punishment for their greed and selfishness. On October 1, 2014 Florida had witness a rare indictment of not one or two but three Florida bankers trying to side step FDIC into giving them a subsidy loan over $3 Million. Donald “Terry” Dubose, Frank A. Baker, and Elwood “Woody” West were all indicted on twelve different counts of banking-related fraud.
Hired in 1998, Ephonia M. Green was hired to work at Association of American Medical College as an administrative assistant employee. Ms. Green’s yearly salary earned her approximately $56,000 a year however she is charged with stealing more than $5 million from AAMC over a period of 12 years until the fraud was discovered in July 2013. Ms. Green’s access to submitting invoices for payments through AAMC allowed her to create a scheme that would catapult her well over her yearly salary.
The report from the Labor Department, mentioned that after the Boston investigation, Foster continued to report fraud to internal sources, including several executives such as a manager director and a vice president and at the end of 2007 she warned executives the number of fraud incidents in subprime lending "may be much higher" than reported. Other findings discovered by Foster included employees who reported or had tried to report fraud at both subprime and prime lending units who “suffered persistent retaliation” (Benoit & Hudson, 2011).
According to Emily Glazer of the Wall Street Journal, Wells Fargo’s Sales Practice Scandal is a result of their corporate culture. The upper level executives could be getting nothing as their bonuses this year as the board continues to decide. This is because those men and women are responsible for the actions of those who they employ/supervise Making money has been the firm’s primary goal for many years and the higher up’s all the way down to the lower managers are responsible for creating this type of environment. According to the Wall Street Journal “One manager…in an email peppered with exclamation points and capital letters…urged her employees to ignore the bosses and get sales up at any cost, says someone who saw the email.” This is a perfect example of terrible managing. Throwing ethics and good conduct out the window just so that a few of the staff get bonuses at the year’s end is just wrong. In class, we constantly discuss the ethics involved in business and recently we’ve spent a lot of time on corporate culture. Shockingly enough, in last year’s annual report the company
Phar-Mor, Inc was a thriving discount grocery store in the late 1980’s. Phar-Mor was moving product quickly but profit margins were not significant enough to pay the bills. By the early 1990’s, Phar-Mor declared bankruptcy due to fraudulent financial reporting and misappropriation of assets, making it one of the largest frauds in U.S. history. Below, we will use auditing standard AU 316.85 Appendix A in conjunction with the video “How to Steal $500 million” to analyze how incentives/pressures, opportunities, and attitudes/rationalizations allowed for fraud to start and continue at Phar-Mor.
Until the intent or motive is recognized, a problem cannot be described or solved. This should be a major question to ask in the Wells Fargo case. Most workers, especially in sales and marketing jobs are known to be compensated and promoted based on their performances (number of products and services sold, number of set targets met). So it is possible that Wells Fargo compensation and promotion structure motivated these employees to engage in such fraudulent acts in order to boost their incentives and bonuses which was measured based on their performance. Because it is surprising that such huge number of employees would engage in such acts to cheat customers for a period of five years. Both former and current Wells Fargo employees told regulators that their motivation to open unauthorized accounts was because of the compensation policies and felt extreme pressure to do that to benefit from such policies (Corkery
Over the few decades, Wells Fargo had built up a reputation detaching itself from the likes of Wall Street by putting their customers first before money. However, one cannot help but think that Wells Fargo put money before customers as their aggressive sales goals led to the opening of unauthorized accounts without customer knowledge. During this fiasco, which dates back to 2011, Wells Fargo employees had opened as many as 2 million of false accounts in real customer’s names without the proper consent. An integral part of the problem were senior executives and management staff involved. Either they overlooked this growing scandal by turning a blind eye, or partook in it themselves, but both ways there is responsibility to be claimed, and guilt to be measured here.
I have devoted countless hours investigating this fraud and it's amazing to me that so many failed to see what was staring them in their faces.
The news that I found that emphasizes the ethical decisions making is about Wells Fargo. The article name is “Wells Fargo uncovers up to 1.4 million more fake accounts”. This news is all about how the people who are working for Wells Fargo can loose their ethical judgments. This people where trying to get their goals, which was to open certain amount of accounts. They where opening this account behalf of people who are not even present at the branch. This is a news that involves ethical decision making.
In California, eight Wells Fargo employees were convicted of committing fraud facing a maximum penalty of 30 years in federal prison, also each employee is charged with at least one count of aggravated identity theft, which carries another two years in prison (https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/eight-people-charged-bank-fraud-scheme-allegedly-used-information-stolen-wells-fargo). In the wake of the scandal, over 5,300 employees were fired over the course of five years for their involvements in the creation of the fake accounts. Some of the initial whistleblowers of the scandal faced retaliation by being terminated for speaking out against the orders to open fake accounts. CNN Money correspondent Matt Egan spoke with Bill Bado, a former employee of Wells Fargo, who has not been able to security another banking securities job since his termination for calling the Ethics Hotline to report the fraudulent activities.
. All their settlements and fines go beyond one hundred eighty-five million that they agreed to pay to officials, when the scandal first began in September 2016. Tim Sloan the new CEO and Wells Fargo executives are distressed with attempting to calculate what the long-term outcome will be. Tim Sloan said in a conference call with investors in October 2016, “our immediate priority is restoring trust in Wells Fargo.” Governor John Kasich, of the state of Ohio, announced that he was prohibiting Wells Fargo from doing business with state agencies and even discounting them from contributing in any state bond submissions, California and Illinois united with Ohio’s Governer John Kasich. All the intimidation from politicians and investors stressed
In today’s society, white collar crime is now becoming more widely known because of the advancement of technological devices and brilliant minds. In fact, over 730,000 counts of suspected financial wrongoing were recorded in America last year, according to recent data from the Treasury Department 's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (The Economist, 2009). White Collar Crime is a term reportedly coined in 1939—is now synonymous with the full range of frauds committed by business and government professionals including one of the many called “Check Kiting” (FBI, 2010). White collar crime is described by the federal bureau investigation (FBI) in three words: Lying, cheating, and stealing which is exactly the kind of people that Scott in this case analysis has to deal with. In this case, the Operations Manager, Scott at a small bank has the duties of overseeing transactions and defining clients who use bad checks. While going through the daily routine, he finds that his wife’s friend, who is the chief financial officer of the bank, appears to be involved in check kiting. According to the business dictionary, check Kiting is a form of check fraud, in which checks are issued against funds that a bank has credited into an account for deposited, uncleared checks. With careful timing of deposits and withdrawals, this scam can be turned into a large sum. Furthermore, In addition to knowing the suspect, Scott also is aware the CFO is also involved in an unsteady
On April 21, 2001, Lee Farkas, the former chairman of a private mortgage lending company, Taylor, Bean, & Whitaker (TBW), was convicted for his role in a more than $2.9 billion fraud scheme (Schoenberg, 2011). This action contributed to the failures of Colonial Bank, one of the 25 largest banks in the United States, and TBW, one of the largest privately held mortgage lending companies in the United States. According to court documents and evidence presented at the trial, Farkas and his co-conspirators engaged in a scheme that misappropriated more than $1.4 billion from Colonial Bank’s Mortgage Warehouse Lending division and
The perfect fraud storm occurred between the years 2000 and 2002 involving two of the largest energy and telecom corporations in the United States: Enron and WorldCom. It was determined that both organizations fraudulently overstated assets, created assets from expenses or overstated revenues, costing investors billions of dollars and resulting in both organizations declaring bankruptcy (Albrecht, Albrecht, Albrecht & Zimbelman, 2012). Nine factors contributed to fraud triangle creating this perfect fraud storm, and assisting management in concealing the fraud until exposed and rectified.