Charlie is just like all the former executives. He is fixated on increasing profits by cutting risk and compliance departments, and getting out from under the Consent Orders. He won’t even backfill desperately needed compliance jobs, so the remediation work can be done. There is no focus on building out a sustainable Compliance Program that will help the company at all. It is all about profits and there is no imbedded risk culture or talk about protecting customers at all coming down from the top. The message from Charlie is get the regulatory work done ASAP so I can get rid of you all. We are being reminded every day that compliance officers are just a cost. He and his minions are even telling us to remove sections from compliance policies, so senior management can close out corrective actions early. If the section isn’t in the policy, then poof it is now gone and the Regulators and auditors can’t hold Compliance accountable for fulfilling that section of the policy. In other words they are removing items from the corporate policies that the risk, compliance or the business line can not solve for or fulfill in the next year or so, in order to make corrective actions go away and to give the appearance to regulators that the regulatory work is progressing. Instead, they should be doing the work right. Also, senior management is definitely misrepresenting the regulatory culture and what is going on to Congress and the Regulators.
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Yes, Wells is continuing the spiral downward. What happened to the internal auditors? Did they realign them out the door or are they being paid off? Because idk how Wells is getting away with some of the sh$t they are doing right now.
Regulators do not care about how many people work in risk or compliance, they care about whether the company is breaking laws. For the most part, systems should have controls to keep employees from doing things like opening fake accounts even if a manager tells them to. WF has already proven you can have a giant compliance department and still break laws, so that argument is out the window. The company needs ethical management, proper incentives for employees and up to date technology with well designed controls.
I have not one time been impressed with a compliance person assigned to one of my projects. They are either clueless, slow, totally incompetent, and not even knowledgeable about relevant LRRs never mind company policy. And they never one time stood up to the business, that was left to Legal and HR. I even saw so called op risk managers tell business leaders it was OK to proceed ahead of compliance’s own approval processes.
Can you imagine how ridiculous it would be for WELLS FARGO to reduce risk and compliance headcount? If I was the OCC I’d be all over that like white on rice.
the take is not enough money to worry about risk and compliance from higher level workers - execs, managers, etc