Case Analysis : Wells Fargo

The Wells Fargo scandal involved a variety of stakeholders who have stake in the issue; however, the main stakeholders include the consumers, the employees and their families, and stockholders of the organization. The affect these stakeholders suffer varies, but the ultimate affect the scandal has had is violation of trust by Wells Fargo and its leadership. When examining this situation, the main stakeholders who suffered the greatest harm from the scandal were the customers who fell victim to the fraud and had their privacy violated by an organization they trusted. In the course text, Trevino and Nelson spoke of the importance of trust and its importance in a service economy. Wells Fargo violation of the consumers’ trust has ultimately added

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

Wells Fargo fired 5300 employees. The employees took millions in fees by regularly opening new

Wells Fargo is an American multinational diversified financial services company. The company operates throughout the world. It is one of the largest banks in the US in the state of assets. Moreover, Wells Fargo is the largest market capitalization bank in the US. It takes the second category in the field of deposits, delivery of home mortgage services, and delivery of credit cards. The company has its headquarters in Francisco, California. The company has coverage of more than twenty-four states in the US. In every state, it has established its headquarters that act as distribution and storage regions for the company's products and services. The company offers insurance, banking, mortgage, and consumer financing through the sale and distribution of its networks across the US. The advantages of Wells Fargo Company are widely distributed: they have helped it realize a stable market in the United States and around the globe.

The article,”To Disclose or Not to Disclose? Wells Fargo Woes Shine Light on a Knotty Problem

Wells Fargo has been penalized and has been fined 185 million dollars because they were opening fake accounts.

Thank you for contacting us to look into whether you might be able to bring an individual claim for telephone calls you received from Wells Fargo. As this point we have to decline representing you in this matter.

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 is a well-known bank that many people and merchants do business with. Whether it is personal, business, or merchant account Wells Fargo provides services for these and many others. Which means that many of the compliance laws and regulations need to be met by Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo deal with highly sensitive data, which they need to ensure that security is up kept and no data is compromised. The security and compliance policies that apply to this organization are the following; Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLBA), Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX), and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Each one play a part in ensuring that the organization meets IT security compliance policy.

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.

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

The ethics of the bank requires that there is ethics of integrity. It is supposed to be created through a culture in the bank and it should be one of the banks priorities because this is a business and they gain the profits from the people they serve on daily basis. Even if the bank shall survive this wave of scandal is so difficult now to convince any client to join this Wells Fargo which shall cause them a lot of money. Also all the old customers may start withdrawing and looking for other banks which they feel are more secure when they are keeping the money for them. It is so hurting and distrustful for a banking instead of accruing money in the accounts of their customers what they wells was doing was that it was misusing their money and giving them extra fees.

In September of 2016, it was revealed that there was alleged misconduct at one of the largest and safest banking institutions in the United States. Wells Fargo Bank was ranked among the nation’s safest financial institutions according to an analysis done by Global Financial, (Inside Tucson Business, 2009). Alleging that between May 2011 and July 2015, there were more than 2 million bank accounts or credit cards opened for customers without their knowledge or permission (Blake, 2016). Clients started complaining the they were receiving debit/credit cards from the bank that they had not ordered. Wells Fargo employees also started complaining that about the unethical behaviors they witnessed or were asked to participate in to the Human Resource Departments, the bank’s internal ethics hotline, branch’s individual managers and supervisors. All which led to the discovery of the fraud scandal.

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.

The reason why Well Fargo Bank is an ethical quandary would be how they have gotten a fine for 185 Million dollars and have fired over 5,300 which were employee and manager.