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Wells Fargo : An Investigation

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Since 2011, Wells Fargo employees across the United States have been opening millions of fraudulent accounts in their customer’s names. (Egan, Matt) Combine the credit accounts with the deposit accounts you get about 2.1 million fake accounts of which 100,000 incurred fees totaling 2.4 million dollars. (Levine, Matt) Through multiple customers filing complaints and Wells Fargo “whistleblowers” the fraudulent accounts were brought to light and Wells Fargo was taken to court in Los Angeles by the Los Angeles prosecutor and federal regulators in the middle of 2016. (Reuters) Whistleblowers are those who expose misconduct of organizations and their members. (Exploring Management) As a result of the federal investigations and the lawsuit …show more content…

(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

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