[w_t_payne]

There is another cultural norm that is prevalent in the financial industry leads (IMHO) to dishonesty. It is an incredibly competitive industry, reliant on a small(ish) number of very well remunerated individuals.

These individuals are put under immense pressure to perform flawlessly. Any mistakes are picked up on very quickly and a perceived weakness can cause the wolves to circle in an instant. There is no incentive to come clean about mistakes, and immense pressure to cover-up and hide any weaknesses or errors.

You can't avoid human fallibility. If you expect perfection, all you get is lies and deceit. The only way to truly outperform is to institutionalise openness, continual improvement, and learning from our mistakes.

[webnrrd2k]

That sounds a lot like medicine, and a lot of other professional services.

[bashinator]

And in medicine, and aviation, and civil engineering, the regulators have teeth because the stakes are so high.

But, there's also a culture of not blaming the lowest-common-denominator employee when there are problems. To the best of my knowledge, the FAA and NTSB explicitly don't blame any individuals when putting together post-mortem incident reports. That's specifically to avoid creating the culture of ducking responsibility that GP was talking about.