Re:Pervasive Sham Deals at Wells Fargo, and No One Noticed?
by arcanus on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @10:29AM
(#12497177)
> how little auditing goes on
Companies see Risk Desks, QA, etc. as 'cost centers', and try to keep these budgets down.
Risk adjusted, they are massive profit centers. In addition to the actual $$ they save in fines, and stock price losses, the damage to the brand is often in the billions. But it is hard to measure the impact of events that do not occur.
But I work in the relatively non-essential world of analytics. I can't imagine that the world of finance is so lightly examined. But I guess 2007 showed us that it really is lightly audited in some aspects.
Really, I think some of the difficulty is in the complexity of our financial system. I'd argue it's similar to how no single person fully understands how a modern OS runs on an x86 chip - usually it works, but there are issues hiding in the shadows. Sometimes one of those CPU errata comes and bites you and the system crashes. Other times there is a stack overflow - something that obviously shouldn't have happened except the code auditing guys didn't do their jobs.