Kempner: (Updated) Will bigshots pay the price at Wells Fargo?

Americans have had lots of reasons to be upset with banks over the years.

But the apparent deceit by Wells Fargo highlighted by regulators Thursday is stunning in its sheer scale. Now, let's see if top executives pay the price.

UPDATE: The Wells Fargo exec who oversaw the suspect community banking division (Carrie Tolstedt) will retire at the end of this year, reportedly with a $125 million package. That's retired, not fired. Meanwhile, CEO John Stumpf apparently is blaming only employees rather than any larger issue with the bank's culture.

"There was no incentive to do bad things," he told the Wall Street Journal.

Forget the $185 million in fines Wells Fargo has agreed to pay in a settlement with the federal government and the Los Angeles City Attorney. (NEW: That's less than one percent of the bank's nearly $23 billion profit last year.)

Thousands of the bank’s employees — apparently pumped up by the prospects of bonuses or worried about keeping their jobs — were involved in secretly opening more than 2 million deposit and credit-card accounts possibly without customer permission.

Customers faced fees they shouldn’t have. Wells Fargo reportedly has fired 5,300 employees and managers over the issues, which by my math is about 2 percent of its workforce.

NEW: Only now does is the bank saying it will eliminate product sales goals for retail bankers, the kind of aggressive push that surely helped inflate the wrongdoing. Stumpf told the Journal such moves would "take more risk off the table." Which, of course, is exactly where Wells Fargo put it in the first place.

Ah, for the good old days, when our big worries in the banking industry involved annoying account fees, hit-or-miss customer service, volatile lending standards and government bailouts.

Bank robbery is supposed to be done by bad guys bursting in the front doors, not the people stationed to pleasantly accept our deposits inside. Bank robbers who get caught are supposed to go to prison. Let’s see whether anything close to that happens in this situation.

The news is bad for consumers and bad for trust in the banking industry overall (like we needed any more doubts after the economic meltdown and the assurances that everyone had learned their lesson).

It also looks like a crushing example of what happens with at least a fraction of employees when you tie pay or job security to metrics. (We saw what happened some years ago with city of Atlanta schools and test scores, right?)

Money motivates. So does fear. That people would attempt to game the system shouldn’t be a surprise. That it apparently continued to happen since 2011 and Wells Fargo didn’t publicly ferret it out and disclose it much earlier is unconscionable. Where were the company’s controls?

We’ll have to see over the days ahead whether top executives are booted along with lots of bank workers.

(UPDATE: Still waiting. Stumpf, the chief executive, remained on the job nearly a week after the announced settlement, which is incredible. If he isn't booted or retired "to pursue other opportunities," maybe Wells Fargo's diligent board will give him a stern rebuke, ask him to think about things he could have done better and shave his bonus. His compensation last year was just over $19 million.)

And in the months ahead we’ll see if anyone gets charged with crimes.

NEW: The Senate Banking Committee has scheduled a Sept. 20 hearing on the alleged wrongdoing and asked Stumpf and other Wells Fargo executives to testify, according to Bloomberg. I expect tough talk and aggressive finger wagging.

The bank, the third biggest by market share in metro Atlanta, seemed like it had mastered the art of cross-selling, getting customers to open more accounts and lines of business with it. But in this case, it looks like Wells Fargo employees skipped the middleman — customers.

Last year, as questions about Wells Fargo’s practices were picking up steam, a spokeswoman for the bank assured the Journal, “Wells Fargo’s culture is focused on the best interests of its customers and creating a supportive, caring and ethical environment for our team members.”

And I have a bridge you can buy in a desert.

In a statement tied to Thursday's settlement, Wells Fargo said it has taken various steps to address the concerns and "is committed to putting our customers' interests first 100 percent of the time, and we regret and take responsibility for any instances where customers may have received a product that they did not request."

Consumer advocate and radio host Clark Howard said in recent years he had received scattered calls from Wells Fargo customers complaining about unauthorized accounts and related actions that had sometimes hurt their credit scores.

“I just assumed it was big bank incompetence,” Howard told me Thursday. “I was lacking imagination.”

More recently, he said, it became increasingly clear there were signs of a pattern that had attracted the attention of government officials.

With thousands of employees involved, Howard said he believes there “is no chance on Earth without management either being aware of it, condoning it or encouraging it.”

But that doesn’t mean any executives will be held accountable.

He pointed out that despite the financial collapse that led to the Great Recession, no top Wall Street executives went to prison. “This is the just deserts from nobody being prosecuted. Nobody going to jail. Nobody doing the perp walk.”

Howard said his team has not fielded complaints about any other big banks opening unauthorized customer accounts the way Wells Fargo is alleged to have done.

“Trust banks” generally, he said. “We are not Argentina. I wouldn’t say take your money out and put it in a mattress.”

Instead, he suggested finding financial institutions that tend to put more attention on customer service, such as credit unions, locally-headquartered banks or online institutions.