Wells Fargo, Part I: How This Happened

wells fargo

Wells Fargo reached a $3 billion settlement with the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission last week, to resolve civil and criminal charges into its unauthorized account scandal from the 2010s. Let’s take a look, since the facts here are a powerful example of how a company can engineer its culture and operations…

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Compliance Lessons: Credit Suisse vs. Wells Fargo

lessons

One big lesson for compliance and audit executives this year will be the risks that swirl around compensation and incentives. Wells Fargo will be Exhibit A in that discussion, and rightly so. Still, the more I look at the SEC’s enforcement action against Credit Suisse last week, where it fined the bank $90 million for…

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Fitting the Fraud Triangle to Wells Fargo

wells fargo

This week I had the good fortune to participate in a compliance forum hosted by Thomson Reuters here in Boston, talking about how to engage with front-line employees to foster a strong compliance program. The conversation was excellent, especially because we had an example ripped from the headlines of how not to manage compliance in…

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Compliance Jobs Report: Feb. 21

compliance jobs

The Compliance Jobs Report this week has new hires at McKinsey, Schneider Electric, Kingfisher, Oxxo, and elsewhere; plus promotions at Unisys, Husqvarna, Royal Caribbean, and more. Job leads are in teaching hospitals, electronics, and environmental defense; and Meme of the Week goes out to Chris Pratt fans! Always remember that we need your help to…

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Regulators Tell USAA: Do Better, Faster

USAA

Head’s up, compliance and IT executives in the banking sector! We have another bank sanctioned by regulators for taking too long to get its regulatory compliance act together. This time it’s USAA taken to the woodshed, for failing to implement reforms promised in previous consent orders from 2019 and 2022. The Office of the Comptroller…

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TD Bank: The Strategic Errors

TD

Today we begin a series on the compliance failures at TD Bank, which pleaded guilty last week to charges that its anti-money laundering compliance program totally sucked. The failures here are so astonishing and the lessons so important, a single post can’t do the story justice.  Let’s start with a recap of the misconduct itself,…

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Feds Hammer TD on AML Failures

TD

The corporate compliance community has a new case-study in program failures courtesy of TD Bank, which will pay more than $3 billion to settle charges that its anti-money laundering compliance program had been a mess for years; and must also live under restrictions on future growth until it completes an overhaul of its AML compliance…

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Fifth Third Bank Settles Bogus Accounts Mess

Fifth Third

Fifth Third Bank has agreed to pay a $20 million fine and to overhaul its employee performance management practices, to settle a long-running lawsuit that workers were opening fake accounts without customer permission to meet sales goals and that they were saddling auto-loan borrowers with insurance the borrowers didn’t need. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,…

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Podcast: Do DPAs Really Work?

Justice

Today we have another Radical Compliance podcast, trying to unpack a question near to the hearts of compliance professionals everywhere: Do deferred-prosecution agreements really work to improve corporate behavior?  This issue has been on my mind lately because federal prosecutors recently accused Boeing of breaching the DPA it struck in 2021 to settle criminal charges…

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Compliance Jobs Report: May 24

Compliance jobs

This week the Compliance Jobs Report has a changing of the compliance guard at Wells Fargo, a new head of compliance at the NRA, and other new hires at Syneos Health, FARO Technologies, Invesco, and more. We also have a slew of promotions to note, and job leads in manufacturing, cars, and consulting. Always remember…

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