Ethical Analysis of Wells Fargo Account Scandal
Banks exist to provide people with financial security. Banks accounts allow for people to store money for saving and investing purposes. People give their money to banks in hopes that the bank will take care of their money. However, history has shown as that banks cannot be completely trusted. For example, in the days of the Great Depression. During the years of President Roosevelt’s tenure, he attempted to make it easier for people to trust banks. Still, many years later, banks cannot be completely trusted. In 2008, the financial crisis was the worst since the Great Depression, and it stemmed primarily from banks’ abuse of people. Once again, there has been legislation to keep banks from abusing
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The 2013 article reported that Wells Fargo had an unhealthy “pressure-cooker” sales culture. At the time of the report, Wells Fargo was the United States’ leading bank in add-on services. The promotion of add-on services is an activity known as cross-selling. Wells Fargo noted its ability to cross-sell in its earnings reports. Proficiency in cross-selling led to increased profits and customer loyalty. However, there was a dark side to this success. Pressure from management to meet sales quotas led to lowered employee morale and opened up opportunities for customers to act unethically. Several branch managers and workers for Wells Fargo from different regions unveiled the stressful environment of the bank. One branch manager from Florida admitted that regional bosses would hold hour long conferences to monitor progress towards daily quotas. Employees who did not meet their quotas were threatened with termination. Wells Fargo’s bankers were often told “they would end up working at McDonald’s.” Another employee reported that management would coach employees how to inflate sales numbers. This employee admitted to giving customers unneeded accounts, but he claimed it was never without authorization. However, he pointed how other employees would open up duplicate accounts for customers without their knowledge and assign them credit cards without their consent. This …show more content…
Solutions for ethical dilemmas are determined by God’s requirements. For Christians, God’s requirements are given in the bible. The bible discourages deception and fraud. In this case, Wells Fargo was clearly unethical. Firstly, threatening the livelihood of a person is unjust. Managers would terminate employees who did not meet their sales quotas and prevent them from finding future jobs in the banking industry. The relentless pressure of management led employees to act unethically also. Employees would deceive customers into opening unneeded accounts or just outright open accounts without customers’
Employees were using the cross-selling which is a concept of attempting to sell multiple products to consumers. This concept led to fraudulent actions, in fact employees were encouraged to order credit cards for pre-approved customers without their consent, and to use their own contact information when filling out requests to prevent customers from discovering the fraud. " The Wells Fargo scandal was far different. Instead of a select few doing bad things, the unethical behavior was widespread at the bank, with thousands of employees engaged in secretly creating new bank and credit-card accounts for customers without their knowledge, resulting in overdraft and other fees." (Kouchaki, 2016). According to the Los Angeles City Attorney, employees were opening and funding accounts without customers' permission or knowledge in order to "satisfy sales goals and earn financial rewards under the bank's incentive-compensation program." This means that the board members of the bank were aware of that it wasn't by the employees' own wills. In fact, they were pressured by aggressive goals and performance which led them to immoral behaviors. Facing this problem, Wells Fargo bank had to take some measures to avoid bankruptcy, losing customers, or loosing brand
on September 8, 2016 Wells Fargo’s unethical behavior was reveal when the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency fined Wells Fargo $185 million because over 2 million credit card and bank accounts were fraudulently open or applied for in customer names without their knowledge (Blake, 2016).
The US has a sophisticated banking system that does a good job of allocating resources in productive place for their customers. However, in an area such as investment banking companies can use the deposited money for risky investments such as foreign government and corporate bonds. When these banks lose money on their investments or go out of business, all of the customer 's savings would be gone. Also, in this type of system bankers are more likely to commit fraud such as opening fake accounts vis a vis Wells
to many people because the bank took over their life. ?The bank is something more than,it?s the
The year 2008 was a very scary one for anyone involved in the US stock market. Due to subprime lending, and cheap mortgages, the housing market became grossly overinflated. Naturally, as with a balloon that’s filled too much, it “popped”. The resulting collapse of the housing bubble had severe implications for the rest of the US economy, housing, and related industries such as lumber, construction, and realty all came crashing down, and the people employed in those fields soon found themselves out of work. As with the stock market crash of 1929, fear of the economic instability caused people to pull their money out of any investments they had. This can be a problem for a healthy bank, being unable to supply the money people are requesting if it’s tied up in loans. However, this would prove to be an even bigger problem if the money never existed in the first place, and would take down one of the largest scams in American history.
Jake Clawson Ethical Communication Assignment 2/13/2014. JPMorgan Chase, Bailouts, and Ethics “Too big to fail” is a theory that suggests some financial institutions are so large and so powerful that their failure would be disastrous to the local and global economy, and therefore must be assisted by the government when struggles arise. Supporters of this idea argue that there are some institutions that are so important that they should be the recipients of beneficial financial and economic policies from government. On the other hand, opponents express that one of the main problems that may arise is moral hazard, where a firm that receives gains from these advantageous policies will seek to profit by it, purposely taking positions that are high-risk, high-return, because they are able to leverage these risks based on their given policy. Critics see the theory as counter-productive, and that banks and financial institutions should be left to fail if their risk management is not effective.
Wells Fargo account fraud scandal One of the most recent white-collar crimes involved Wells Fargo, a banking and financial services provider. In 2016, San Francisco-based bank Wells Fargo (WFC) employees secretly created millions of unauthorized bank and credit card accounts without permission of their customers. Opening about 1.5 million fraudulent deposit accounts and submitting 565,443 credit card applications allowed Wells Fargo employees to boost their sales targets and receive bonuses. Consequently, customers were wrongly charged fees for accounts they did not know existed. In this business crime scenario, Wells Fargo is involved in paying $185 million in fines and refunding $5 million to affected customers.
As Wells Fargo convicted all the requirements of fraud they are involved to the business crime called fraud, they are liable to their fraud crime. There was a false statement which respectively conducted to the injury to the alleged victim as a result. Wells Fargo has been ordered to pay $185 million in fines, but that's a pittance compared with the $5.6 billion the bank earned in just the second quarter of this year. Meanwhile, the bank's victims weren't just nickel-and-dimed with overdraft and maintenance fees. Many of them took "significant hits" to their credit scores for not staying current on accounts they did not even know about. They will likely have difficulty securing home and car loans at reasonable rates for years to come, simply because their bank decided to defraud
Ethical behavior is behavior that a person considers to be appropriate. A person’s moral principals are shaped from birth, and developed overtime throughout the person’s life. There are many factors that can influence what a person believes whats is right, or what is wrong. Some factors are a person’s family, religious beliefs, culture, and experiences. In business it is of great importance for an employee to understand how to act ethically to prevent a company from being sued, and receiving criticism from the public while bringing in profits for the company. (Mallor, Barnes, Bowers, & Langvardt, 2010) Business ethics is when ethical behavior is applied in an business environment, or by a business. There are many situations that can arise in which a person is experiencing an ethical dilemma. They have to choose between standing by their own personal ethical standards or to comply with their companies ethical standards. In some instances some have to choose whether to serve their own personal interests, or the interest of the company. In this essay I will be examining the financial events surrounding Bernie Madoff, and the events surrounding Enron.
In October of 1929, the American economy took a huge hit from the stock market crash. Since so much people had invested their money and time in the banks, when the banks closed many had lost all of their money and were in the deep poverty. Because of this, one of my first actions of the New Deal was the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Every bank in the United States had to abide by this rule. This banking program I launched not only ensured the safety and protection of deposits made my users of banks, but had also restored America’s faith in banks, causing people to once again use banks which contributed in enriching the economy. Another legislation I was determined to get passed...
The selected issue for the paper is where an employee has not given their current or potential customers accurate information when opening accounts or requesting new services from Washington Mutual. When a person is in the workplace proper business ethics is used on a daily basis. An employee can make ethical decisions by applying their critical thinking skills to the situation they can ensure that the decision that they make is the right decision. The decision process can be very tiresome process but with the proper procedures one can become a better decisions maker.
According to Milton Friedman’s view of individualism “what corporations have the obligation to do is make a profit within the framework of the legal system, nothing else” (Machman, 1994, pg. 57) is what position Wells Fargo took in this case. According to this theory Wells Fargo leadership was acting ethically because their goal was to make a profit which they did, and it was “bad employees” who were to blame and committed the fraud. The Utilitarianism theory by John Stuart Mill states that “utilitarianism is attempting to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. “(Johnson, C, 2016, p. 4). According to this theory I believe Wells Fargo would be unethical because they didn’t do the greatest good for the greatest number of people whom were affected. In fact, they did the opposite by acting unethically to the greatest number of people which were their
In previous years the big financial institutions that are “too big to fail” have come to realize that they can “cheat” the system and make big money on it by making poor decisions and knowing that they will be bailed out without having any responsibly for their actions. And when they do it they also escape jail time for such action because of the fear that if a criminal case was filed against any one of the so called “too big to fail” financial institutions it...
During the past year Wells Fargo, a well-recognized bank of the United States, has been trying to clean its name and the mess it got itself into, when it was brought to the public that the bank was involved in generating fraudulent checking and savings accounts for its clients without their knowledge or their authorization. “The way it worked was that employees moved funds from customers' existing accounts into newly-created ones without their knowledge or consent”
In commercial banking, one of the most typical reasons that lead to high stress is that the staff must (by any means) manage to meet the daily sales target in selling financial products to customers. Hilary Osborne (2013) reports how a staff member at Halifax described how stressful the sales culture there is, with “sales targets are everywhere” and “throughout the day, staff discuss how much they have sold and how they can sell more”. Specifically, there were around four meetings in a Halifax branch a day, discussing which products will be sold to which customers, which staff claimed left them quite “disheartened and demotivated” because “how can you know a customer's needs without ever speaking to them?”. If the customers available at the branch don’t buy much financial products, staff will need to “call existing customers about the potential products they could want”. All sales will be translated into points and since each branch has to make roughly 5,000 points a day, “pressure is put on staff again to find more points from customers before 5pm”.