Seeking Accountability for Wells Fargo Sham Accounts

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/opinion/seeking-accountability-for-wells-fargo-sham-accounts.html

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To the Editor:

Your excellent Sept. 23 editorial “The Wells Fargo Spillover Effect” doesn’t highlight the missing oversight of Wells Fargo by its major federal regulators: the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve.

After the recent financial crisis, federal regulators were supposed to increase their surveillance and oversight. The opening of a huge number of bogus accounts since at least 2011 and continuing until recently — in spite of a 2013 Los Angeles Times exposé — boggles the mind.

Worse still is the failure of Wells Fargo’s outside auditors, KPMG, to notice the fraud. As a former chairman of the audit committee of a New York Stock Exchange company and the president of a company that rates corporate accounting practices, I am shocked at the lack of internal controls at Wells Fargo.

VICTOR GERMACK

New York

To the Editor:

Re “A Banker Faces the Music” (Business Day, Sept. 20): How comforting to read that Wells Fargo’s chief executive, John Stumpf, accepts “full responsibility for all unethical sales practices” at Wells Fargo. His contrition is hardly needed.

The Senate Banking Committee will absolve him of all his sins while blathering about the efficiency of the free markets and attacking those annoying job-killing regulations. The Wells Fargo board of directors will congratulate him on his deft use of damage control.

And in the trenches, the marketers will cook up the next sales scheme while the advertisers will play an endless loop of Deepwater Horizon-like spots extolling newfound social responsibility. Let’s not forget all those “ethics workshops” the human resources department will mandate.

If it all sounds like a corporate “Groundhog Day,” it should.

COLLIN G. MATTON

Fairfield, Conn.