Question

Pick a specific company, research the situation, what credible information was published about the offense, and what the company stated are lessons learned from the incident. If you were a CIO or CISO how would you protect your environment?

Remember to cite your sources. If you are defining terms and referencing the any published material directly, you should use quotation marks quote your passage in line with the (author, date, page number).

For extra credit, discuss reputation and financial impacts to your organization of choice.

Answer 1

Wells Fargo Company

Well Fargo Bank was considered to be quite reputable bank across the world. The Bank was known for its fair and ethical practices. However in the year 2018, the famous fake consumer scandal involving the bank came into light. The bank admitted to creating fake accounts of customers as well as framing customers with invalid mortgage fees. The company was also abusing the customers by making them register for car insurance which they did not need. This is an example of a recent white collar crime, conducted on a global scale.

The primary factors which led rise to this multiyear sales scandal are as follows:

• Economic pressure on the bank made it pressing on the employees to hit critical sales targets. The achievement of the sales target was linked to employee bonuses
• As the sales target was quite huge, the employees started indulging in unfair practices to realize the same. The employees used to create fake accounts in the customer names and hit sales target to receive their bonuses.
• The customer was misled and abused to register for unfair and irrelevant insurance policies
• The corporate governance of the company did not have ears to the ground and they were not able to catch hold of the scandal
• The incentive policy of the company was pressurizing the employees. The policy can be considered as one of the major factors which may have led to the scandal.
• Absence of a dedicated auditing committee led to the compliance violations and failures
• The leadership had turned a blind eye to the miseries of the employees, which eventually led them to conduct such a scandal
• Various whistleblowers tries to throw light on the scandal but they were ignored by the management

In my views, the involvement of corporate governance and leadership with the ground level employees could have prevented the scandal. The corporate governance did nothing to save the employees from getting exploited under tremendous pressure of performance. The whistleblowers needed to be attended to, on priority. This could have made the governance and the management catch hold of the unethical ploy quite early. Lack of process transparency as well as absence of auditing committees also contributed and supported the scandal to get deep-rooted in the bank.

Reference:

• Article Name: Wells Fargo Opened a Couple Million Fake Accounts
  • Article Date: Sep 9, 2016
  • Author: Matt Levine
  • Publication website: Bloomberg
• Article Name: How Wells Fargo is dealing with its fake accounts scandal
  • Article Date: Oct 3, 2019
  • Author: Erika Fry
  • Publication website: Fortune