Gina Siqueira's Corporate Compliance

1533 Words4 Pages

Now with all these rules and regulations in place to create a sense of trust in the business accounting community, within a year the first CEO was punished under the new set of laws. This means that these CEO’s knowingly signed off on fraudulent or untrue documents. “Chief Executive Officer Calixto Chaves and Chief Financial Officer Gina Siqueira settled the charges, with Chaves agreeing to pay a $25,000 fine. Siqueira cooperated with the SEC and will not be required to pay a fine. The two executives and the company itself agreed to be subjected to stiffer future penalties if they violate SEC laws again. The two, who are Costa Rican residents, did not admit to or deny the charges.” (Yun). These two executives were not deterred by the laws or …show more content…

He did this knowingly and willfully to prop himself and the company up while “apparently with the knowledge that many of these retail accounts were created without customer authorization” (Target News Service). Leading to the assumption that the executives of the company did tell the lower level workers to meet a quota by whatever means necessary. The SEC has previously found securities fraud when an executive makes misleading statements on earnings calls. “During the Senate Banking Committee hearing, Mr. Stumpf claimed under oath that the firing of more than 5000 employees for creating more than two million possibly fake accounts was not "material" to investors” (Target News Service). Mr. Stumpf emphasized the company's increasing number of retail accounts and growing to cross-sell ratio on quarterly earnings calls with investors and analysts, and several analyst reports from that period recommend purchasing Wells Fargo stock in part because of those strong numbers. Mr. Stumpf and Wells Fargo investors clearly believed that the cross-sell ratio and the number of retail accounts were material to investment decisions and yet, Mr. Stumpf did not disclose that those numbers had been inflated by millions of fraudulent accounts, which must be pointed out is illegal and unethical. The fact of the matter is that this man decided to lie to his investors to show false profit margins to inflate the size of his pockets. At the expense of average American citizens, he lied to his investors who are trusting him with a company that they have a say/vote in. Wells-Fargo may have violated the regulations of whistleblowers which too is illegal. The firing of whistleblowers shows that the executives were guilty of what they claimed that

Open Document