Had adequate incentives and protections for whistle-blowers been in place at the Federal Reserve, the FDIC or the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the fraud at Wells Fargo might have been stopped before it spun out of control. And those who were fired for speaking up would have had someplace to go.

As we now well know, Wells Fargo not only opened millions of unauthorized client accounts, but the bank also fostered a corporate culture so toxic that an astounding 5,300 employees have been fired for their involvement in the companywide multiyear scheme.  What should bother us more is that our banking regulators appear to have been in the dark the whole time.

Studies consistently show that a significant percentage of employees are aware of wrongdoing in the workplace. In the case of Wells Fargo, several employees raised concerns about these troubling practices within the bank and suffered retaliation for doing so. Unfortunately, these employees had little incentive and no way of safely alerting regulators without risking their careers. Unlike other financial police, banking regulators either have no whistle-blower programs that provide incentives and protections for individuals to break their silence about wrongdoing they witness, or these regulators have little-known programs with comically small awards.

While there have recently been successful prosecutions involving whistleblowers at JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and UBS, these were securities or tax-law violations, and the whistle-blowers were participating in programs of the SEC or the IRS.

Without robust whistle-blower programs, bank regulators are like beat cops who don’t have a working 911 system. Regulators and law enforcement officials need real-time information about what is occurring inside these vast institutions. The importance of whistle-blowers cannot be overstated.