The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu The leading online blog in the fields of corporate governance and financial regulation. Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:32:46 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.8 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cropped-photography-4-e1706898544564-1-32x32.png Wells Fargo Lessons: Will Leaders Ever Learn? – The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu 32 32 Wells Fargo Lessons: Will Leaders Ever Learn? https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2017/04/26/wells-fargo-lessons-will-leaders-ever-learn/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=wells-fargo-lessons-will-leaders-ever-learn https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2017/04/26/wells-fargo-lessons-will-leaders-ever-learn/#comments Wed, 26 Apr 2017 13:12:12 +0000 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/?p=85849?d=20170426114410EDT Posted by Ben W. Heineman, Jr., Harvard Law School and Harvard Kennedy School of Government, on Wednesday, April 26, 2017
Editor's Note:

Ben W. Heineman, Jr. is former GE General Counsel and is a senior fellow at Harvard Law School and Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He is author of The Inside Counsel Revolution: Resolving the Partner-Guardian Tension (Ankerwycke 2016), as well as High Performance with High Integrity (Harvard Business Press 2008).

We’ve seen this bad movie before. The question is why does it keep repeating itself and why do business people never learn the obvious lessons?

An internal report from independent Wells Fargo directors and the law firm, Shearman & Sterling has recently laid out in detail the sorry story of systemic consumer fraud that began 15 years ago in 2002. The misconduct was eye-popping. To meet sales quotas, receive incentive compensation and please superiors, thousands of Wells Fargo employees (5000 in recent years) falsified bank records, forged customer signatures, opened more than 2000 unauthorized checking or savings accounts for non-consenting customers, charged improper fees, and illegally transferred customer funds.

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