from the how-far-did-Wells-Fargo-go-to-far? dept.
NPR reports:
This month federal regulators fined Wells Fargo $185 million for opening checking and credit card accounts on behalf of customers who had no idea that was happening. The bank has promised to try to make restitution. [...] In some cases, Wells Fargo employees would transfer funds into the new accounts from one of the customer's existing accounts. That could result in late fees or fines for insufficient funds. Ira Rheingold, executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates, says that would have had a direct impact on someone's credit score. "You may not have qualified for a mortgage or you might have been dinged by getting charged a little higher interest rate because of what was reported wrongly on your credit report," he says. But the potential impact goes beyond the customer's finances. These days, credit scores are routinely checked by potential landlords, by employers — even by cellphone companies. Wu says someone who has racked up too many overdraft fees because of unauthorized accounts may have trouble getting another checking account.
The U.S. Labor Department will launch a review of complaints related to Wells Fargo:
U.S. Labor Department Secretary Thomas Perez on Monday pledged to conduct a "top-to-bottom" review of all cases, complaints and other alleged violations that the department has received concerning Wells Fargo in recent years. Perez's announcement, outlined in a Sept. 26 letter to Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, comes after Warren and other Democrats asked the Labor Department last week to launch a probe into possible wage and working-hour law violations involving Wells Fargo tellers and sales representatives who may have stayed late to meet sales quotas.
Previously:
Wells Fargo Fined Over Unauthorized Accounts.
Related Stories
5,300 Wells Fargo Employees Fired Over 2 Million Phony Accounts
You should be able to trust your bank, right? According to CNN Money, Wells Fargo employees attempted to meet sales goals and boost their income by creating unauthorized accounts and applying for credit cards on behalf of their customers — without their authorization:
"Wells Fargo employees secretly opened unauthorized accounts to hit sales targets and receive bonuses," Richard Cordray, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said in a statement.
[...] Wells Fargo confirmed to CNNMoney that it had fired 5,300 employees over the last few years related to the shady behavior. Employees went so far as to create phony PIN numbers and fake email addresses to enroll customers in online banking services, the CFPB said.
The scope of the scandal is shocking. An analysis conducted by a consulting firm hired by Wells Fargo concluded that bank employees opened over 1.5 million deposit accounts that may not have been authorized.
The way it worked was that employees moved funds from customers' existing accounts into newly-created ones without their knowledge or consent, regulators say. The CFPB described this practice as "widespread." Customers were being charged for insufficient funds or overdraft fees -- because there wasn't enough money in their original accounts.
Additionally, Wells Fargo employees also submitted applications for 565,443 credit card accounts without their customers' knowledge or consent. Roughly 14,000 of those accounts incurred over $400,000 in fees, including annual fees, interest charges and overdraft-protection fees.
The CFPB said Wells Fargo will pay "full restitutions to all victims."
[Continues...]
Wells Fargo previously admitted that employees opened around 2.1 million unauthorized bank accounts in customers' names. Now that number could rise to 3.5 million:
Nearly a year after Wells Fargo's fraudulent account scandal burst into public view, the bank said it had turned up more than a million additional accounts that customers may not have authorized.
The news set off a fresh wave of criticism from those frustrated by the bank's slow pace in coming clean about its misdeeds. "Every time we get one of these announcements, the pressure rises," said Nancy Bush, a banking industry analyst who runs NAB Research. "How many customers, and how many employees within Wells Fargo, are coming to the conclusion, 'I don't need to be associated with this'?"
The findings brought the number of potentially unauthorized accounts to 3.5 million — a nearly 70 percent increase over the bank's initial estimate.
Wells Fargo agreed last September to pay $185 million to settle three government lawsuits over the bank's creation of sham accounts. Thousands of employees, trying to meet aggressive sales goals, had created accounts in customers' names without their knowledge. Workers who met the bank's sales targets received bonuses — and those who did not risked losing their jobs. At the time, Wells Fargo said that 2.1 million suspect accounts had been opened from 2011 to mid-2015. But it also acknowledged at the time that the problems may have begun earlier, and said it would expand its review to include accounts opened from 2009 to 2016.
Also at NPR, Reuters, and Bloomberg.
Statement from Wells Fargo.
Previously: Wells Fargo Fined Over Unauthorized Accounts
Wells Fargo Likely Hurt Customers' Credit Scores; Labor Department Launches Review
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NCommander on Tuesday September 27 2016, @06:22AM
I'm hoping WellsFargo falls, and falls hard, and maybe prompt true reform in the banking sector. Credit scores have always been an odd and mysterious black box, to the point that you can get dinged for actions outside your control. Not holding my breath, but maybe for once we can see someone useful come out of the hill.
The fact of the matter is the more I keep reading though, I keep thinking that if this was a novel, I'd probably write it off as too unrealistic for the amount of stupidity involved.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday September 27 2016, @05:35PM
Not holding my breath, but maybe for once we can see someone useful come out of the hill.
Won't happen. They're going to get off easily when Hillary takes office, because these guys are her good buddies. It'll be exactly like what happened with the Microsoft antitrust trial when GWB took office, and the DOJ dropped the case.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday September 27 2016, @06:02PM
Won't happen. They're going to get off easily when Hillary takes office, because these guys are her good buddies.
I don't think she considers the Wells Farfgo PAC, that donates 66% of it's money to Republicans, [opensecrets.org] to be good friends.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Tuesday September 27 2016, @07:24AM
This was entirely predictable based on the US Government's long history of letting banks off with a slap on the wrist (including this one - the $185m is just the cost of doing business).
I'd love to travel to the alternate universe in which the banks were not bailed out following the GFC, and in which those individuals who broke the law ended up in jail. I strongly suspect that the Wells Fargo of that universe (if it still existed) would be behaving itself.
Would also love to see jail time for the 5,000 odd Wells Fargo employees who did this and for any managers that encouraged it. Oh, and I want a pony too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 28 2016, @05:21AM
I'd love to travel to the alternate universe in which the banks were not bailed out following the GFC, and in which those individuals who broke the law ended up in jail. I strongly suspect that the Wells Fargo of that universe (if it still existed) would be behaving itself.
I wouldn't. Too big to fail is not a joke. The bailout had to happen despite the fact that the people who benefited the most were the most culpable. Everybody else had too much lose.
But I'm right there with you on jail time. And Elizabeth Warren recently said it herself, people need to go to jail. When the companies can just pay fines for the malfeasance of their officers it eliminates the only kind personal responsibility that matters. We need bailouts for people in the ghetto and jail time for the kleptocrats, but we've been getting the reverse.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 28 2016, @06:24AM
I wouldn't. Too big to fail is not a joke. The bailout had to happen despite the fact that the people who benefited the most were the most culpable. Everybody else had too much lose.
And that's how too big to fail works.
But I'm right there with you on jail time. And Elizabeth Warren recently said it herself, people need to go to jail. When the companies can just pay fines for the malfeasance of their officers it eliminates the only kind personal responsibility that matters. We need bailouts for people in the ghetto and jail time for the kleptocrats, but we've been getting the reverse.
The crime was incidental. Agressive enforcement would not have done a thing about the "too big to fail" problem.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Tuesday September 27 2016, @09:52AM
Two things here bother me...
First, of course, is the fact that a bank would open thousands of these phantom accounts without customer authorization. This happened, if I understand the situation correctly, because management imposed impossible sales goals on the staff. Classic "management by spreadsheet": top management has a spreadsheet, in which their sales went up by 20%. The managers blithely dictate to their staff "make it so". As if the real world is somehow required to follow their beautiful little spreadsheet model. I've worked with companies like this, and the staff plays all sorts of stupid games in futile attempts to meet impossible expectations. Is this what they teach in those overprices MBA programs?
Second, credit scores. As a European, I find the American credit-reporting process absolutely shocking. You have a private business relationship with your bank. They should have no right to hand private customer information to a third party. When I lived in the US, I requested my credit report - huge amounts of detail, all of it private (from my viewpoint) but shared without my permission. Lots of very disputable information and plenty of outright errors. Wells Fargo like: there was one credit card I never knew about: likely some sales associate signed me up without my knowledge, to meet some sales quota. Why do you put up with this horrible system? While Europe lacks some rights that Americans take for granted, we have an explicit right to privacy - recommended, you should add it to your list.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27 2016, @12:24PM
In Germany there is a similar organisation called Schufa, to whom you waive your privacy whenever you open an account with credit facility.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Kromagv0 on Tuesday September 27 2016, @02:11PM
Credit in the US is a rather fucked up system at all ends. Issuing companies, reporting companies, collection companies. I've never liked the cred reporting companies and the scams they seem to run, my personal favorite is putting a freeze on your account with them but that costs money but they will sell your information to every entity out there. Then add in that they reporting agencies also offer "credit monitoring" services to keep your credit report clean but don't do fuck all to clean up obvious fuck-ups. Thankfully I haven't had to deal with that mess but have had to deal with some fraud but American Express quickly resolved when they tracked me down even though I wasn't a customer but someone had taken out a card in my name. My personal experience with the shit end was having had to deal with debt collectors who can't figure out that I am not the person they are looking for as the debt they are trying to collect is older than I am.
With the most recent one I managed really put the screws to them. They would call multiple times a day and caller ID would show their phone number and list them as "Toll Free Call". Eventually I answered the phone, said hello and then got to hear their PBX system click and eventually it hung up on me. I googled their number and it came up with nothing so I figured they were some scam operator. After that I started answering their phone calls stating that they are to never call this number again and that this is harassment and must stop now and demanded to know who was calling. Each time I would hear their PBX system click and eventually it would hang up on me. During all of this I had been diligently documenting every call they had made and recorded the ones that I had answered. Without making any headway figuring out who or what this company was I contacted the MN Attorney General to file a complaint against this unknown entity that was harassing me. A few days later I got a response back indicating that they were a debt collector and that they had every right to be contacting me because they were a debt collector and that they would open a case on them but if they hadn't done anything illegal there wasn't anything they could do. I was however given information on how to deal with an overly aggressive debt collector if I felt they were in the wrong and that in that case I should file complaints with the MN department of commerce and Federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). So I filed a complaint with each one and in a matter of hours received a confirmation form the CFPB that they had sent written notification to the debt collector to no longer contact me by phone and that that notification had been received.
I continued to receive calls for a a couple of additional days and on the second day I filed additional complaints with the CFPB and MN department of commerce as well as provided additional information to the MN Attorney General as now they were violating the law as they had been told in writing that there were to not contact me by phone. I provided copies of the CFPB confirmation notice indicating when they were told and a copy of my phone call log show their continued attempts at illegal contact. After I received the second confirmation notice the calls stopped.
A few days later I received a letter from the collection agency as well as documentation on the loan. The problem is that this was in response to my first CFPB complaint in which I had provided my information that is to have been used by the collection agency to determine if the loan was mine or not. I responded back to them indicating that I am clearly not the person that this loan belonged to and that would have been clearly obvious had they done their due diligence (not even a close birth date, the loan was older than I am, the person who the loan belonged to lived in a state I have never been in, social security numbers weren't even close, only the first name was a match) and that I should have never been contacted in the first place and then should defiantly not have been contacted after I had provided my info to the CFPB. I informed them that at this point they had willfully violated the law by disclosing information about an outstanding debt to an unauthorized 3rd party and that I would now be filing additional complaints with the CFPB, MN Department of Commerce, and MN Attorney General and that I would be including this communication.
A little more than a week later I get a letter from the debt collector demanding that I contact them to resolve this issue and setup some sort of repayment plan otherwise they will accessing liens against my property and suing me in court. They also claimed that they had indeed stopped calling me when they received the written notification from the CFPB. In response I sent them another letter where I stated again that I am not the correct person pointing out all of the obvious discrepancies. Additionally I told them that any further attempts to collect this debt from me will be viewed as harassment and a criminal attempt to defraud me and that even if they are not the party attempting to collect the debt I will consider them as part of a conspiracy to defraud me. Furthermore I demanded that for me to consider the issue resolved the company would have to deliver to me a letter stating that I was not the owner of this debt and that they had made several mistakes and undertaken several illegal actions in their attempt to collect this debt. The letter was to be notarized and delivered no later than 2 business days after receipt of my letter and that it would be delivered by certified USPS mail with delivery confirmation. After I had received their letter I was to never be contacted about this debt by them or any other company otherwise I will immediately be filing a criminal complaint against them and who ever else may be attempting to collect the debt as well as a civil suite against the same entities for harassment as is my legal right as written into the fair debt collection practices act. My final demand was that the tract down the actual owner of the debt and inform them of their illegal activities, the disclosure of personal information (seriously I could open tons of accounts in this person's name with what I got) and that person's rights under the law which happened to mean that the debt is no longer legally collectable. I also stated that I would be forwarding copies of their letter as well as my letter, the final letter they were to send me and all of the supporting documentation that proves that they have continued to lie and take illegal actions in collecting this debt to the CFPB, MN Department of Commerce, and MN Attorney General. Yes I did do this.
3 days later I received my notarized letter from them profusely apologizing and stating that this was all a misunderstanding and begging that I don't provide anything to the CFPB, MN Department of Commerce, and MN Attorney General. Problem was I am a dick and had already sent copies of all that I had off to them. I then sent off copies of this last letter because fuck them I'm going scorched earth since they screwed the pooch really bad and just happened to find someone who was a vindictive ass hole who was entirely in the right. About a week after sending off that last letter I got letter back from the CFPB, MN Department of Commerce, and MN Attorney General all stating that they were starting investigations into this debt collector withing a few days of each other. The letters thanked me for my patients with the system and also congratulated me on the quality of the evidence I had provided. The CFPB and MN Attorney General were likely looking into the criminal aspects while the MN Department of Commerce would be looking to stop them from operating in the state.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday September 27 2016, @04:01PM
So sorry to hear of your story. Thankfully [crosses fingers] I've never had to deal with an inaccurate debt collection attempt myself. But I always find it sad to hear how many times consumers have to resort to contacting governmental agencies just to get some small action or reasonable review from a company these days. Four times in my life so far I've had to escalate things to government agencies when I've been incorrectly charged by utilities. In two of those cases, the companies' own records showed they were wrong (and they admitted so on the phone to me), but they just never seemed to correct the errors and I just kept getting statements each month with the charges (and even more late fees) piling up.
Come to think of it, it's really hard to recall many disputes I've had over charges that have ever been resolved painlessly, even when there was an obvious error. Maybe 2 times I've actually had a customer service person say, "Oops... okay, I can fix this," and they actually do it. The vast majority of the time they either ignore you, refuse to fix the error, or say they'll fix it but don't. Generally, I have to resort to at least threats of escalating to another level (government agencies or something other external body that exert influence).
All I know after reading your report is that I'm glad my disputed charges have never been sent to a third-party collector. That would have been a nightmare.
(Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Tuesday September 27 2016, @06:10PM
I think a if a few more people would go scorched earth on them we might start to see some actual resolution to these poor behaviors but far too many people just take it. When I had to deal with American Express several years ago that was painless as they tracked me down to collect a late payment and actually believed me when I told them I didn't take out the credit card and didn't live in New York. I do encourage people to know their rights especially when it comes to debt collectors now since I think we are seeing a resurgence of the really scummy ones since I am sure the backlog from 2008 is being worked through.
I usually try to resolve things in a reasonable fashion first but once the other party acts unreasonable I tend to go all nuke form orbit. I did a similar thing to an insurance company that didn't want to pay fair market value for a wrecked car and there I took them to small claims court and won. At the time I was just out of college and didn't have a job (guess who graduated just after the .com bust) so I had the time to fight it. The car was valued at $3100 or $3150 in the NADA and KBB guides but the insurance company claimed it was only worth $1200. Long story short I won and the judge basically scolded the insurance company stating that it should have never made it this far as what I was asking for was completely reasonable. So instead of paying out some value in the $3100 range they instead paid for an independent appraisal that they didn't like the results, storage of a wrecked car for 6 months, court costs to have someone show up in court, $35 for my filing fee, and $3150 for the value of the car.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27 2016, @05:14PM
Well done sir! I applaud you. 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27 2016, @05:24PM
Thank you for your service.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27 2016, @05:25PM
Bravo! You are my hero!
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday September 27 2016, @05:41PM
Holy shit, they should give you an award and the key to the city for this one. Hopefully they'll lock those fuckers up for 10 years and seize all their business and personal assets too.
My hat's off to you. You've done a wonderful service for humanity.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday September 27 2016, @03:10PM
Second, credit scores. As a European, I find the American credit-reporting process absolutely shocking. You have a private business relationship with your bank. They should have no right to hand private customer information to a third party.
Where in Europe? I admittedly don't know as much about European credit markets as American, but most European countries do have methods to share negative credit information among banks, particularly for loans. They may not always be as detailed as American credit reports (particularly in terms of reporting positive events, like consistent responsible credit usage and payments), but if you do bad things with credit in most European countries, it will follow you just as it does in the U.S.
Personally, I do find the U.S. system invasive too, particularly in terms of the reporting of exact amounts for loans, credit limits, credit card statements/payments, etc. The credit scoring system could basically work just as well if banks and lenders reported general range information rather than exact amounts. Credit scores could still be calculated and a prospective lender could still tell whether you have a regular history of "pays as agreed," or whether you have $500 of credit and are maxed out vs. $100,000 of credit and basically no debt.
I also think credit reporting agencies should be required by law to offer "free credit monitoring" and let you view your report at any time. Or, if they refuse, they should be required by law to send you written notification whenever a significant new item is added to your report, e.g., a new account opened, a new address reported, any "hard" inquiries which show up on your report, any new negative items. It's the minimum necessary to prevent identity theft, account misuse, and the very frequent errors that appear on reports. Credit report errors really affect people's lives in very significant ways -- even if you aren't outright denied a loan, you might end up paying many thousands more in interest if you don't qualify for a better rate or whatever. The law allowing you to view your reports once per year is a major step ahead, but it's really not enough for something that influences people's lives and financial well-being on such a significant level.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday September 27 2016, @03:22PM
The summary says:
Wu says someone who has racked up too many overdraft fees because of unauthorized accounts may have trouble getting another checking account.
But this isn't the major issue here. As the NPR story notes later on:
"What happened to the consumer who, the employer looked at their credit report and didn't give them a job because they saw they had all these credit cards open? How do you figure that out?" says Rheingold, the consumer advocate.
Likewise, he says, how does Wells Fargo calculate how much it owes someone who had to pay a higher mortgage rate because of the inaccurate information it sent to the credit bureau?
This isn't about a few overdraft fees and problems getting another bank account. Credit scores can impact your life in major ways. A shift in a credit score could result in additional hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest on a larger mortgage because of a bad rate. Even for typical middle-class folks, it still could easily be tens of thousands of dollars. Even on an auto loan, it could be many thousand dollars. And yes, some employers, landlords, etc. could deny you a job or an apartment or whatever too.
I already said this in another post, but we need to have much greater safeguards that allow monitoring of information reported to credit agencies. No one should ever have to wait for their "free annual report" and take their own initiative to find out, "Gee, these companies are reporting a credit card I don't even have!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27 2016, @05:18PM
Welcome to the world of Big Data.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 28 2016, @05:23AM
> Welcome to the world of Big Data.
This. 1000x times this.
Big Data is Opaque Data and its only going to get worse.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday September 27 2016, @05:48PM
I have a simple solution for this: anyone who feels they may have been impacted by WF's crimes here should be able to file a complaint with the government, detailing how they were harmed. The government should also get a list of everyone affected, and check their credit history to see if they may have been affected. It shouldn't be that hard to calculate the loss: for a mortgage or car loan, just take the difference between their current interest rate, and the best-possible rate they could have gotten. For a job, find out what the job would have paid, and multiply by 5 years. For overdraft fees, add them all up. For a missed apartment, find out what their current rent is, and multiply by 5 years (because they didn't get to live in the place they wanted). Now multiply that number by 3, and force WF to send those people a check for that amount. Don't allow WF to go bankrupt until all its assets are gone, and then go seize all the personal assets of every WF executive, and every WF employee who was involved in this scam too. 5000 employees should have significant personal assets to seize.
This is why I should be dictator: we wouldn't have slap-on-the-wrist punishments for big companies when they do stuff like this, we'd have real punishments, for everyone involved, and we would make things right for the victim, and then some to compensate them for their time and trouble.
(Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Tuesday September 27 2016, @06:20PM
I would think that there would easily be some fraud as well as conspiracy to commit fraud criminal charges that could be brought without much effort. Now if any of the people affected were OCD raging assholes we might see some results. Unfortunately I (an OCD raging ass hole at times) was not nor have ever been a Wells Fargo customer so it seem unlikely I would have been affected.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday September 27 2016, @06:29PM
Don't allow WF to go bankrupt until all its assets are gone, and then go seize all the personal assets of every WF executive, and every WF employee who was involved in this scam too. 5000 employees should have significant personal assets to seize.
While I agree Wells Fargo should be severely punished, I think at some level we need to consider who was really responsible for this behavior. Are these 5000 employees (mostly low-level ones fired) all equally culpable, enough to have their lives ruined (even beyond the fact they've already lost a job)?
There's a bit more complexity to the story [cnn.com]. If you don't want to bother to read that link, there's evidence that there was retaliation against people who called an internal ethics hotline or otherwise spoke out against these practices within Wells Fargo. A number of people apparently were fired for doing so. Which means that this appears to be not only condoned within Wells Fargo, but encouraged and "protected" as a practice.
I know everyone likes to think they would never commit an unethical act like this at their job. Just like most people can't imagine they would ever join the German army and follow Hitler during WWII. But lots of psychological studies show the effect of peers and actions in creating an ethical "baseline" for behavior. Perfectly "normal" people can turn into abusive bullies simply by telling one group they have absolute authority over another [wikipedia.org].
So, you have a bunch of low-level people who have their own rent to pay, etc., and they're told by their coworkers that the only way to hit company quotas is to open some extra accounts. How much harm could that cause? Not only are a bunch of people around them doing it, but the guy who tried to speak out against it was fired. These people need their jobs much more than executives do, so they do what it takes.
I'm not trying to excuse the actions, but most of the 5000 aren't really the people to place most of the blame on here -- supervisors, executives, HR folks who went along with covering it up, and anybody else who knew this was going deserve a lot more blame for creating an institutional culture that encouraged actions like this. Most of these 5000 people aren't paid much and probably didn't even think about the ramifications of their actions (like effects on credit scores, etc.). But the higher-up folks ARE paid to worry about larger effects of company policy, as well as to ensure that actions are ethical, etc.
This is why I should be dictator
I know you're (probably) joking, but no one should have that kind of power... for the simple reason that no one person has perfect knowledge and understanding.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday September 27 2016, @09:00PM
there's evidence that there was retaliation against people who called an internal ethics hotline or otherwise spoke out against these practices within Wells Fargo. A number of people apparently were fired for doing so.
In that case, I would exempt these people from punishment. The others who happily went along with it get nailed to the wall.
Just like most people can't imagine they would ever join the German army and follow Hitler during WWII. But lots of psychological studies show the effect of peers and actions in creating an ethical "baseline" for behavior.
Yes, and the answer is to structure society so that people are severely punished when they commit horrible crimes just because some authority figure in a uniform or white lab coat orders them to. People need to think for themselves, or they can suffer the consequences of their bad actions. The horrors in Germany in WWII happened not only because a few assholes at top planned and ordered these horrors, but also because literally millions of regular German people (and others too) willfully followed these orders. Leaders only have power because other people happily follow them and do their bidding.
I'm not trying to excuse the actions, but most of the 5000 aren't really the people to place most of the blame on here -- supervisors, executives, HR folks who went along with covering it up, and anybody else who knew this was going deserve a lot more blame for creating an institutional culture that encouraged actions like this.
I entirely agree that supervisors, executives, and especially evil HR people (there's no other kind) deserve even worse punishment, including significant jail time. The 5000 low-level people should merely have to pay fines (unless they were the ones who got fired--those should get huge compensation); the people at top should get prison time.
I know you're (probably) joking, but no one should have that kind of power... for the simple reason that no one person has perfect knowledge and understanding.
That's why I'll have advisors, and put together a great team. You seem like you'll make a good advisor, so I'll keep you in mind and give you a ring when I become dictator.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 28 2016, @05:28AM
Yes, and the answer is to structure society so that people are severely punished when they commit horrible crimes just because some authority figure in a uniform or white lab coat orders them to. People need to think for themselves,
Structure society so that people need to think for themselves.
I bet you don't even realize those two things are diametrically opposed, do you?
Ah, if only people were as simplistic as binary computers.