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The ethics of wells fargo
The ethics of wells fargo
The importance of ethics to a bank
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Wells Fargo Conduct & Behavior
Wells Fargo is one of the largest banking and financial holding companies in the world. With this title concerning power in leadership as well as power from a political perspective Wells Fargo Company is an organization that provides a power base for it employees. This occurs through the meeting of needs and surplus within the market place. More so, this company is also politically structured and provides opportunities for their employees to develop careers in which the people’s platform for the expression of individual interest and motives. With Wells Fargo being politically structured to a degree this means the banking company operates by distributing authority while setting the stage to executive power for
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On the other hand other factors are the results of organizational culture or internal environments. In Wells Fargo’s case the factors include risk of military invasion, intelligence property protection, favored trading practices and pricing regulations, other adding factors are antitrust laws and money centered banks. Regardless of these contributing factors ethical behavior should always be abided. According to Wells Fargo code of ethics and business, conduct is the guiding principles involving every one of Wells Fargo teams. One of Wells main goals is to practice ethical behavior from an employee level as well as an organization. Contrasting this is the scandals that have recently become part of the public ears; it’s here that Wells Fargo has taught other organizations a valuable lesson how not to practice business. In the least the bank giant has made an ethical mistake when employees were encouraged to support cross selling while honoring incentives to the employees who were successful at cross selling. This however, is where things at the bank began to go wrong and business such as this one cannot be allowed to get away with. To make matters worse employees were investigated after many of them identified as creating fake credit cards at the customer’s expense. This event was a very …show more content…
In most companies, power and politics are considered to be dirty words because of the structure each is placed on. Linking these words to the play of personalities in a company’s reveals some top executives and managers withdraw into the safety of organizational logic. Although the Wells Fargo banking business has rules and guidelines to govern their employees, somehow there has been much going on inside the business where discrepancies in ethical behavior has revealed scandals based on fraudulent deals, cheating customers out of their finances. For this reason Wells Fargo ethical practices have been criticized and under heavy scrutiny. The 5,300 employees at ell Fargo, who were fired for fraud, admitted they were working under high stress and unstable environments. Some employees that was coheres into committing fraud said the stress was so high; they experienced anxiety and resorted to drinking hand sanitizer to cope with the stress. This is the failure of good leadership, but specifies corruptive
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
Key stakeholders are owners, directors, employees, and the community that the organization draws it resources businessdictionary.com,2016). Out of the 1000 Wells Fargo customers that were surveyed 3% stated that they were personally affected by the scandal and 14% of them stated that they have changed banks while 30% of them were currently looking to switch. Studies predict that Wells Fargo could lose about $99 billion in deposits and $4 billion in revenue because of customers rejecting to do business. Individual customers weren’t the only ones that were affect by the scandal but similarly 10,000 small businesses (Razin, 2016). I believe that the owners will be affected as well because of profit losses that will eventually affect Wells Fargo shares and the employees were affected after 5,300 of were fired (Razin,
It's difficult not to be cynical about how “big business” treats the subject of ethics in today's world. In many corporations, where the only important value is the bottom line, most executives merely give lip service to living and operating their corporations ethically.
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.
The company’s employees were illegally opening bank and credit card accounts in the names of actual customers. It is believed that employees were doing this in fear of not meeting their sale goals. Cowley explains the activity as being a criminal enterprise (Cowley 1). This refers to a large scale group that is responsible for long-term and elaborate drug conspiracies. The idea proves to be accurate because this is not the first time Wells Fargo has been questioned because there have been investigations going back to 2011.
Yet, John Stumpf, CEO of Wells Fargo, denies that the bank’s culture is obsessed with nonstop selling. According to him, the scandal resulted because some employees did not honor the bank’s values (Glazer). It was recently disclosed that Wells Fargo fired 5300 employees in the past few years, including the manager who forced employees to meet sales targets (Peck). Yet, questionable sales tactics persisted and were an open secret in several of the bank’s branches. The branch managers regularly monitored the employees’ progress toward achieving sales targets and reported it to higher-ranking managers.
Many organizations have been destroyed or heavily damaged financially and took a hit in terms of reputation, for example, Enron. The word Ethics is derived from a Greek word called Ethos, meaning “The character or values particular to a specific person, people, culture or movement” (The American Heritage Dictionary, 2007, p. 295). Ethics has always played and will continue to play a huge role within the corporate world. Ethics is one of the important topics that are debated at lengths without reaching a conclusion, since there isn’t a right or wrong answer. It’s basically depends on how each individual perceives a particular situation. Over the past few years we have seen very poor unethical business practices by companies like Enron, which has affected many stakeholders. Poor unethical practices affect the society in many ways; employees lose their job, investors lose their money, and the country’s economy gets affected. This leads to people start losing confidence in the economy and the organizations that are being run by the so-called “educated” top executives that had one goal in their minds, personal gain. When Enron entered the scene in the mid-1980s, it was little more than a stodgy energy distribution system. Ten years later, it was a multi-billion dollar corporation, considered the poster child of the “new economy” for its willingness to use technology and the Internet in managing energy. Fifteen years later, the company is filing for bankruptcy on the heels of a massive financial collapse, likely the largest in corporate America’s history. As this paper is being written, the scope of Enron collapse is still being researched, poked and prodded. It will take years to determine what, exactly; the impact of the demise of this energy giant will be both on the industry and the
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.
The core of the ethical breakdown within Wells Fargo revolved around the profit-oriented culture that developed in many of its branches. The implementation of bonuses that relied solely on money brought into the bank encouraged unethical practices from employees all the way from bank tellers to high up executives. As stated in Glazer’s article on the topic, the bank’s foreign exchange management celebrated big trades and money made for the bank and going even further to ring a brass bell in the office when a big sale was landed. Such practices bring to mind the somewhat recent film “Wolf of Wall Street”, which isn’t an image one should associate with a bank. Other malicious practices included opening millions of fake accounts as a front to simulate
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 a Forbes survey of around 1,000 Wells Fargo customers, 3% were directly affected by the scandal, 14% are still deciding on switching banks while 30% are already on the search. If such happens on the broader scale of Wells Fargo and its customers, the company will be hit hard because of the scandal. Forbes claims that if this holds true for the rest of the company; Wells Fargo could suffer from a loss of almost $100 billion in deposits and $4 billion in revenue for the next year and a half. All because of aggressive goals for a company and people wanting praise for the success of their branch. To make matters worse, around 10,000 small businesses could’ve be harmed by the scandal as well.
In this paper I will identify and analyze the Wells Fargo scandal as it pertains to the breakdown of leadership and ethics. I will first identify and analyze the event and discuss the challenges and conflicts the scandal presented. Then I will evaluate the issue by explaining why the issue has interest and concern to stakeholders followed by discussing the challenges presented to individuals and/or organizations around this case. Lastly, I will recommend action steps that should be taken to those involved as well as discuss what I have learned from exploring this topic.
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 many circumstances, employees’ behaviors are likely to follow their leader. Enron’s leadership has been extremely influential due to exemplified charismatic. For example, Heffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay, CFO and one of executive member in Enron, greatly encourage employees to follow their lead. Their incompetence accounting profession directly affects lover level of employees. Eventually, those manipulating accounting activities affect company collapse. Once leadership has done unethical professional accounting behaviors, unethical acts become accepted. Employees have many reasons for remaining quiet. While Enron still have ethical internal rules, when leadership in Enron did not abide and did not provide corresponding example of employees to follow (Prentice 2003, p. 417). Which eventually make Enron’s become one of the largest corporate scandal frauds.