Recently Wells Fargo’s scandal of creating phony accounts has raised ethical concerns in the corporate world. Wells Fargo employees opened more than two million unauthorized bank and credit card accounts to meet sales projections. The company was charged with huge fines and earned a bad reputation that will take years to rebuild.
According to the Deontological perspective on ethics least some acts are morally obligatory. Under this approach, an action is considered morally bad because of some characteristic of the action itself, not just because the product of the action is bad. Wells Fargo unethical practices demonstrates unethical behavior, under deontological ethical theories as its employees duty to operate in an honest and fair fashion , in providing services to the public. Wells Fargo codes of conduct does not permit sales practices of these sort, therefore the employees who participated in these practices made unethical decisions. Unfortunately there was a wrong-doing on a massive scale. The acts of unethical behavior were conducted by both the employees and management. The management initially failed to publicly acknowledging the problem that raise concerns for the shortcoming of their inadequate controls to detect the fake
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Decisions taken within an organization are made by the leadership in light of the company’s culture, principles and policies. Leaders are the role models as they set the tone for the ethical stance of their individual followers, or the group they lead. As an ethical leader, they are expected to take responsibility and work to correct mistakes. They must ensure the company has an effective internal controls in place to identify unethical practices. In my opinion, big companies in their audit and compliance committees should have members who may act as ethicist to assess whether the actions of the company are consistent with the desired ethical