Wells Fargo Employees Who Reported Ethics Concerns Got Fired

Doing the right thing doesn’t always pay off.

Remember the recent Ms. Businesslady column about whether a letter writer should report wage theft at a partner’s job? Ms. B’s first response was to say “this is your partner’s issue to deal with, not yours,” and then she clarified that reporting an ethics issue can be a risky move:

“Dear Businesslady: Should I Report Wage Theft at my Partner’s Job?”

I’m not a lawyer or an ethics expert, but my ruling is that you let it go. If nothing else, it seems like taking this on is going to be a huge pain in the ass, and when you combine that with a threat to your household income, not to mention the potential demise of a well-regarded local institution, it seems like the risks outweigh the rewards.

As CNN Money just reported, Wells Fargo employees who took similar risks got fired.

Wells Fargo workers: I called the ethics line and was fired

One former Wells Fargo human resources official even said the bank had a method in place to retaliate against tipsters. He said that Wells Fargo would find ways to fire employees “in retaliation for shining light” on sales issues. It could be as simple as monitoring the employee to find a fault, like showing up a few minutes late on several occasions.

“If this person was supposed to be at the branch at 8:30 a.m. and they showed up at 8:32 a.m, they would fire them,” the former human resources official told CNNMoney, on the condition he remain anonymous out of fear for his career.

From an outsider’s perspective, you have to wonder whether getting fired would be, if not the best short-term result, better for the workers long-term. (You don’t want to be one of the employees called out for opening fraudulent accounts, right?) However, as CNN explains, getting fired from a bank can have additional consequences.

The firing certainly took a huge toll on [Bill Bado’s] life. It put a permanent stain on his securities license, scaring off other prospective bank employers. Today, the New Jersey man’s house is on the verge of being foreclosed on and he’s working part-time, at Shop-Rite.

This is the part where I’d usually end with a question, like “What would you have done, if you thought your employer was behaving unethically? Would you have tried to report it, knowing the potential consequences to your career?”

But in this case I know that this type of hypothetical is really hard to answer. Sure, we might think, of course we would report. If the ethics violation were significant enough. If we could afford to lose our jobs. If we thought we would be protected as whistleblowers (whether or not that was actually the case).

So I’ll leave the question unasked.

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