Tavares, FL Sept. 8, 2016
Are you a Wells Fargo banking customer?
Apparently, many bank employees increased their sales numbers by creating over 2-million fake accounts in customer names to make sales look better, and in some cases customers were billed for bounced checks due to moves of their funds to the fake accounts. Over 5300 employees were fired over recent years for doing this after creating two MILLION phony accounts. The case was uncovered by the City of Los Angeles Attorney's office, and fines were $185-million.
So if you are a Wells Fargo customer, check to make sure you were not a victim where bogus credit card accounts, etc were setup in your name, or you were billed for bounced checks due to the employee shifting some of your funds to a fake account. Read this CNN report.
Apparently, Wells Fargo must have put high pressure on employees to "make their numbers" and they created fake accounts to do so. In some cases, it could have been just a reaction to a poor controls system to increase business commissions.
As a former internal auditor, I always spent time seeking broken business controls where sales commissions were involved. It is common for sales managers or commission based employees to cook numbers to increase commissions or make sales goals. In one case I found, the international sales manager for a software firm reported millions in sold software. but his office did not bill the "customer", who was a warehouse operator storing the software. That is called "selling in" vs "selling through" where he was reporting product sold to a distributor where it was only stored to increase commissions. The problem is his cooked numbers were used to increase marketing expenses, thus causing profit losses when it was caught. By stopping the process, and not granting increased marketing and commission spending beyond last quarter's ACTUAL sales, profits rebounded for the entire international sector.
VJ
