The Senate was not terribly sympathetic — from either party — in grilling the CEO of Wells Fargo over widespread account creation fraud, false or unauthorized accounts being generated without customer permission in order to meet cross-selling quotas by lower-level employees
I have, in fact, little doubt that John G. Stumpf did not know this was going on. If he did know, he probably took steps to stop it. Why? Because the point of ratcheting down the screws on front-line employees to generate additional accounts and service charges or face lack of advancement or firing was not done simply to churn fake accounts. That profited the company very little, comparatively. The point was to generate customers buying additional services.
It was a hardly-unusual case of (over-)incenting certain outcomes and having unexpected behaviors to meet those incentives take place.
That said, it is a moral certainty that the ethical culpability extends significantly higher than the front-line employees — 5300 of them — who have been fired as a result of the scandal. At lower management levels, there would have been plenty of incentive to tacitly (if not explicitly) encourage employees to pursue these shenanigan, in order to boost their aggregate upselling numbers.
But management apparently hasn't been touched in this. Just the folks on the pointy end of the stick who did the wrong thing for reasons they were told were imperatively right.
If Mr Stumpf were serious about this being a Bad Thing, there would be some follow-up punishment for more than just line staff. What branch manager had the highest degree of cross-selling of this sort, based on the records already exposed. It's perfectly reasonable to assume that they knew, or should have known, what was going on. Out.
Who's their boss? Or who's the regional manager with the highest aggregate number of violations? They're accountable, if not responsible. Out.
Take up to a high operational level. There's a chance that someone might be falsely tarred (though, honestly, if they benefited from having artificially pumped up numbers, they should have known enough to follow up on them). But at this point, putting the fear of God into the rest of the organization would probably be a pretty useful thing. Eliminate the chain of most benefit up the Senior / Executive VP Level. I'm pretty certain the other folk will become a bit more diligent in their compliance training and choice of incentive programs.
