Hacker News Reader

Comment by brendoelfrendo | Hacker News Reader

One of the big things I was told repeatedly while working for a financial institution is that the appearance of impropriety is, in many cases, just as bad as actual impropriety, and this is why. Oh, you avoided oversight because you wanted to have a better connection with your client? Well, too bad: everyone is now assuming the worst because assuming anything less is how people get away with the worst.

And, frankly, it's hard to assume positive intent. These are bankers, they should know this. If they knew it and did it anyway, then yeah, I'm glad they got hit by the fine and I don't really have any sympathy for the blight of bad chat software.

View on HN

I agree that you can't discern the difference between the appearance of impropriety and literal impropriety and shouldn't try to.

My point is that the existence of fines and non-stop training courses drilling in the correct messaging software to use to all employees doesn't end this behaviour. Do we increase the punishments or require more training courses to be taken? Will that have any effect?

I'm suggesting that if we really care about reducing impropriety we should also improve the software in use.

The fines are what will make the software improve. Someone was slacking on that for years but now they have to pay enough that they could have lavishly staffed an entire company if they could use something like Teams.

You're assuming they didn't make more than $200 MM by evading regulations. I'm willing to bet they made significantly more than this and will continue to operate profitably as that is their business. This fine is barely 1% of their quarterly profits.

I was responding specifically to this thread, which is not assuming malice but was arguing that bad software incentivized using WhatsApp. In that case, licensing or building anything would be cheaper.

If this was done for malice, I agree that the fine would have minimal effect.

Fair point. My mistake.

No worries — I certainly wouldn’t rule out malice from them but in this case general IT mishaps seems entirely plausible.

No I think it's never that simple. I would agree they shot themselves in the foot and it s fair game to assume as much, but in reality it was a sentiment of systemic impunity laced with laziness, most likely.

This also means that since financial crime most arises out of opportunity rather than genetic predisposition, this would eventually have let to it if it had not already. The fact the SEC discovered it during investigations doesn't sound very good in that regard.

And a lot of non finance people always dismiss fines because they sound small vs the whole group profit, but damn 200 mil it s a team entire year of profit and it would fuck me to hear the bank had to give it back because assholes couldnt get bothered to transcribe whatsapp into emails at the very least.

I hear these arguments over and over again. 'The fines are significant and surely it won't happen again!' And yet, the same things keep happening over and over and over again.

Please point me towards some examples where these types of fines actually changed how companies do business, because as far as I can tell they keep getting fined for the same things over and over again and they keep making record profits!

I can dig up examples where banks are fined hundreds of millions when they made billions. Why should I believe this is any different?

Personally, I don’t think it matters what amount the fine is. Fundamentally, short of putting all your employees in a Faraday cage, it is not possible to prevent this activity.

I think it can be reduced, and good software can help, but stamping it out is impossible.

Please note that this comment only refers to this rule in general, not to the specific JPM instance.

Does this mean that we're training bank employees that "If something looks bad, you might as well do the actual bad thing because the punishment is the same"?

Could this have the effect of actually increasing incidents of bad behavior?

No, it has the opposite effect on me, a bank employee, to immediately report everything weird because even if I do nothing wrong, want banks to behave legally, and have never personally traded a stock in my life, the appearance of impropriety is just as bad as actual dishonesty.

Never did it make me think I could just as well front run clients with a secret account since forgetting to disclose an old account I never used was bad too. I declared late that old account and apologized instead, for instance.

I think these rules are, like all rules, also mostly to draw responsibilities in case of trouble: they do nothing to prevent a criminal to crime, but once the crime is done, he cant claim he did everything by the book if the book was so clear.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com