By Emma Wu
Wall Street is a long-standing symbol in American history. Through the years, it has come to be a symbol for global finance as well as the financial center of America. It is one of the largest stock exchanges and financial firms with thousands of employees. However, monitoring communications of work with thousands of employees makes keeping track of personal communications difficult. These employees work with highly confidential information regarding the growth and crash of stocks. This makes it imperative that there is no personal employee communication about work. Unfortunately, several large financial corporations were fined for not monitoring how their staff use their personal devices at work. These work violations accumulated to nearly 1.8 billion dollars in fines.
A sweeping industry probe began last year and swept through the financial firms in Wall Street. Through sweeping industries, bank employees were found to be routinely communicating about business matters and materials through text message apps and other personal devices. These institutions do not preserve the confidentiality of bank information communications, hence leading to violations in the rules of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Due to the need for privacy in regards to stocks and exchanges, this makes the violations of personal communications about work materials extremely severe. Hence, fines on these firms total to the extremely large amount of 1.8 billion.
These failings on monitoring employee communication occurred at 16 firms all over Wall Street. These include Barclays, Bank of America, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, and many others. The firms have all admitted that their conduct violated record keeping laws, and as such they have begun to implement improvements to their policies and procedures in regards to employee management.
