The Sept. 9 Star Tribune included a story ("Wells Fargo to be fined $185 million") that addressed a record-setting penalty levied against that bank for creating well more than a million new customer banking accounts without those customers' permission. Additionally, Wells Fargo employees were found to have created more than half a million unsolicited credit-card accounts without the account holders' knowledge.
The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which levied the fine, found that the practice of artificially ginning up sales figures had been going on throughout the Wells Fargo banking system since 2011 — that is, five full years. While most of these unauthorized accounts reportedly ended up generating no fees for the banking giant, 85,000 of them resulted in $2 million in fees paid by unwitting customers.
As stunning as this announcement was, there was another fact I found even more jaw-dropping, and one that the published article somehow failed to include: The CFPB report states that Wells Fargo has fired 5,300 employees for participating in this practice.
Five thousand three hundred.
Let's allow that to sink in for a moment. We perhaps would be not so shocked to learn that a handful of employees schemed to create fake accounts to boost their own sales figures or earn bonuses. An under-the-counter conspiracy of some sort among a small, select group? Sure. Ho-hum. Just financial shenanigans as usual.
But 5,300 employees? Over a five-year period? The breadth of the deception is utterly astonishing.
It is inconceivable that a practice so widespread took place without the knowledge and complicity of Wells Fargo managers. And if it did take place without raising a single department head's eyebrow, one has to wonder what else escaped management's watchful gaze during that same five-year period.
This leads me to wonder: How many of these 5,300 fired employees were customer service "grunts," and how many were their managers? And if every manager up and down the Wells Fargo chain who had knowledge of this practice or failed to observe this massive pattern of deceit was not cashiered, then why not? Why should I or anyone else feel comfortable doing business with this company? A bank is supposed to be more than a locked vault where cash is kept. Laugh if you will, but a bank is also supposed to be about trust.
