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In your reckoning why were the whistleblowers persecuted, if the bank top brass did not gain from it? How, in your understanding, did the line managers orchestrate firing of employees who notified HR organizations specifically set up for reporting such grievances?

There were obviously relatively senior (above branch level) people in on this scam, otherwise as you say, the jig would have been up as soon as a few people went to HR. I'm just not convinced that it's absolutely necessary for the most senior people to have known about it, especially since I can't imagine what they would have gotten out of it.

Yet SarbOx is still the law.

> I'm not actually sure about that. Why would they want to encourage this sort of behaviour when it never made the bank any money?

Huge bonuses based on performance metrics? WF executives were given 100s of millions in bonuses during this period of fraud.

so isnt that extraction of value from the company? the company lost money paying out bonuses for sales it didnt make.

The most senior staff (C-suite) usually have compensation which is aligned with ultimate financial results of the company. I assume that there must have been mid-level WF headquarters people in their retail business who were compensated based on the number of account openings, these people would have had an incentive to cover up fraud that they suspected was going on in the branches.

The performance of the company for those C-level executives is measured in how high the stock price is. The number of accounts and customers that a bank has influences this, especially when it is growing consistently over a long period of time. This means that the C-level executives did get a benefit when lower level people were fraudulently creating these accounts.

Keep in mind that C-suite compensation typically is on the scale of a few years or less, not 5-10 years which is where you'd start to care about long-term ramifications of behavior such as this.

>Presumably, C-suite people are compensated based on the financial performance of the bank...

They were. Many of their performance incentives would have also been tied to WF stock values, which were greatly inflated due to WF's higher than industry average cross sell metrics. Although as you observed many of the accounts were no-fee the company's stock benefitted from these non-revenue improvements