Question

Sometimes the question of responsibility is asked so that we can identify the cause and, in turn, prevent it from happening again. What recommendations would you make to prevent what happened at Wells Fargo from happening again?

Where would you place primary responsibility for Wells Fargo scandal: individual employees who forged customers’ accounts, managers who oversaw those employees, senior executives, board members, or the corporation itself? Why? Are any of the perpetrators more or less culpable than the others?

Answer 1

A lesson learned, from the wrongful act should not be repeated again, With legacy and high brand equity among the banks, a bank of that scale should not practice fraudulent activities, which impact's its customers. This way they have lost customer trust and loyalty. Either success or failure, its employees play a vital role in navigating it.

Recommendations:

1. Audit: frequent auditing is the key to avoid frauds in the bank

2. Encouraging employees to make use of whistleblower policy and conducting frequent refresher training related to various policies such as compliance, the whistleblower will help the bank's employees to be vigilant all the time and report on time. So that things can be investigated and corrected before it slips out of hand.

3. The bank should set reasonable targets, pushy targets, and sky-high targets will lead to scandals and frauds.

Primary people in scandal: In my perspective, every single employee who was aware of the fraudulent activity is at fault. If employees are practicing bad activities, its the manager or superior's responsibility to identify and have to blow the whistle or a colleague of an employee who is aware of the wrongful acts need to take a step and complain to the concerned team. Knowing and pushing it under the carpet is a way to encourage crime. Restating the same point all the members starting from the board, senior executives, employees, and others who are directly, indirectly involved, and aware of the wrongful acts are culpable.