Back in that era I worked for a Wells Fargo joint venture doing credit investigations. Our clients were LOs, and my job was to research negative items on credit reports. If I could get the creditor to say one of a set of things, it would allow me to strip the item from the report and then resubmit it to the big 3 for rescoring. Basically I turned loan refusals into acceptances.
It became clear to me quite quickly the business's QA process was designed for deniability, not to actually find fraud. The highest performing person in my unit never made a single phone call all day. He'd claim he'd been at it so long he had contacts at all the creditors he could just fax. What he was really doing was simply fabricating his work.
The most pathetic thing about it is doing the job straight up was quite easy. I spent about 2 hours a day on work, and the rest doing whatever I wanted on the web. The negativity of all this actually inspired me to shift careers to coding, so I used my remaining time there to learn a ton, mostly reading CS papers.
I'd say the worst institutionalized nonsense I saw there was WF's "Alternative credit" reports.
Here the borrowers would supply 3 references of someone they'd paid installment payments over time. Typical examples were jewelry stores, small used car lots, etc. It was immediately clear to me most of these were straight up fabricated. I'd often call someone, they'd answer with an ordinary family name, then I'd follow the script and say who I was calling from, and they'd immediately switch modes and say "Oh yes, this is actually Shady Dave's Used Cars. $Borrower bought a car from me. They always paid as agreed" often without me having mentioned the borrower's name yet. In fact the wording was so consistent it was absolutely clear the LOs had told them exactly what to say. But under the rules I was supposed to follow, that counted.
At the time I knew it was fraud, but was somewhat ambivalent about it, as nearly all of these people were low income minorities or immigrants that face a great deal of discrimination in the loan application process. Once I was a bit older I understood better and regretted that ambivalence.
When the thunderclouds started to appear near 2008, I was not surprised in the slightest.
More recently when I read headlines about WF branch managers opening 2nd accounts in their customer's name without request nor consent, I was also totally unsurprised.
The corruption is deliberate and is instituted top down, just in a way that's more wink, nod, and shaping of processes to create obvious opportunities than overt. I'm most familiar with WF, but I'm confident this is the industry norm.
I think people generally underestimate the scale of institutionalized corruption, even in supposedly low corruption nations, of this form, and how much of a loss it is to the economy and the ordinary person.
I'm not going to pretend I'm smart enough to think up some technocratic solution.