The trouble started when I picked out a problem. This was not a little problem, either: It was a blatantly illegal $250 million deal. I thought I was protecting the bank. A lot of my success over the years had been due to spotting this kind of thing and stopping it. In the past, that's how I'd climbed the ladder, and I didn't see why it would be different this time.
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Above: several hundred things that are apparently more important than the law.
When I pointed out that the deal was super illegal, their response was for me to just sign off on it and let it go through so they could post the earnings that year. If it caused a problem the following year, so be it. They had bonuses to earn now, and any potential prison terms were the future's problem -- and the future would probably have a way to deal with them (lasers or something, knowing how the future rolls).
So I did what I was supposed to do and pulled the sale from the market, because "lie about $250 million today" seemed like crime on a comic book-villain scale. They responded by firing my ass at top speed. A lot of what you see on TV right now about the collections industry as a whole being investigated by the FTC, OCC, SEC, CFPB, AGs, and DOJ started with the wrongful termination suit I filed in Texas against JP Morgan Chase.
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And the government's elaborate wrist-slapping apparatus whirred into motion.
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