I don't know how the author can draw this conclusion. He seems to say that employees engaging in shady practices is the inevitable conclusion of requiring a certain amount of accounts to be opened, and then blames the employees for doing it instead of those who wrote the policy.

The article quotes:

"Wells Fargo has strict quotas regulating the number of daily "solutions" that its bankers must reach; these "solutions" include the opening of all new banking and credit card accounts. Managers constantly hound, berate, demean and threaten employees to meet these unreachable quotas. Managers often tell employees to do whatever it takes to reach their quotas. Employees who do not reach their quotas are often required to work hours beyond their typical work schedule without being compensated for that extra work time, and/or are threatened with termination.

"The quotas imposed by Wells Fargo on its employees are often not attainable because there simply are not enough customers who enter a branch on a daily basis for employees to meet their quotas through traditional means."

This reads to me like damning culpability. Then he says, "But obviously no one in senior management wanted this." Well of course they don't, now that they've been caught! But it was a pretty good scheme at the time raking in millions of dollars.