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Wells Fargo & Co.: The Wells Fargo Scandal

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Wells Fargo & Co. is a popular banking company that provides various banking services to individuals and businesses alike inside the United States. As of recently, a massive scandal within this company has come to light. On September 8, 2016, evidence was reported to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Los Angeles City Attorney and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) suggesting that Wells Fargo & Co. had opened more than 2 million bank accounts and issued unauthorized credit cards without their customers’ knowledge/consent between the months of May 2011 and July 2015 (Masunaga and Koren, 1). To make matters worse, there were managers that tried to silence the employees that spoke out against the opening of these …show more content…

Wells Fargo is currently facing a $185 million dollar fine for allegedly committing these acts of fraud. The CEO of Wells Fargo, John Stumpf, received feedback from numerous U.S. senators including Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren accusing him of “gutless leadership” and suggesting that he resign (Taylor, 1). Stumpf had to forfeit his multi million dollar stock benefits/awards and has retired from his position as CEO due to this incident of scandalous proportions (Bryan and Turner, 1). This scandal is problematic because the employees were motivated to open these accounts because the managers incentivized them to do so for monetary rewards via the employee sales goals program. The CEO also knew about the incentives that the employees were trying to achieve and the means that they needed to go about to achieve them and didn’t change the means to go about achieving those incentives. Obviously, what was morally important (treating all stakeholders in a way that maximized their net happiness) was not in line with what was valuable to Wells Fargo and its employees (offering more monetary incentives so the employees could live comfortably while simultaneously earning Wells Fargo more money by opening more

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