[Mvandenbergh]

The most senior staff (C-suite) usually have compensation which is aligned with ultimate financial results of the company. I assume that there must have been mid-level WF headquarters people in their retail business who were compensated based on the number of account openings, these people would have had an incentive to cover up fraud that they suspected was going on in the branches.

[derivagral]

Keep in mind that C-suite compensation typically is on the scale of a few years or less, not 5-10 years which is where you'd start to care about long-term ramifications of behavior such as this.

[daemin]

The performance of the company for those C-level executives is measured in how high the stock price is. The number of accounts and customers that a bank has influences this, especially when it is growing consistently over a long period of time. This means that the C-level executives did get a benefit when lower level people were fraudulently creating these accounts.