location privacy protection

Ques Mon

1551-3203 (c) 2017 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/TII.2017.2773646, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
1
 Abstract—In the research of location privacy protection, the
existing methods are mostly based on the traditional anonymization, fuzzy and cryptography technology, and little success in the big data environment, for example, the sensor networks contain sensitive information, which is compulsory to be appropriately protected. Current trends such as “Industrie 4.0” and Internet of Things (IoT), generate, process, and exchange vast amounts of security-critical and privacy-sensitive data, which makes them attractive targets of attacks. However, previous methods overlooked the privacy protection issue, leading to privacy violation. In this paper, we propose a location privacy protection method that satisfying differential privacy constraint to protect location data privacy and maximize the utility of data and algorithm in Industrial Internet of Things. In view of the high value and low density of location data, we combine the utility with the privacy and build a multilevel location information tree model. Furthermore, the index mechanism of differential privacy is used to select data according to the tree node accessing frequency. Finally, the Laplace scheme is used to add noises to accessing frequency of the selecting data. As is shown in the theoretical analysis and the experimental results, the proposed strategy can achieve significant improvements in terms of security, privacy, and applicability.
Index Terms—Differential privacy, location privacy protection, location privacy tree, Internet of Things.
I. INTRODUCTION HE development of information technology has accumulated a great deal of data for today’s digital systems.
Big data is a very important research and development resource,
This work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China
(61772282, 61373134, 61772454, and 61402234). It was also supported by the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (PAPD), Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province (KYCX17_0901) and Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center on Atmospheric Environment and Equipment Technology (CICAEET). (Corresponding author: Jin Wang.)
Chunyong Yin is with the School of Computer and Software, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing 210044, China (e-mail: yinchunyong@hotmail.com).
Jinwen Xi is with the School of Computer and Software, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing 210044, China (e-mail: javenxi@yeah.net).
Ruxia Sun is with the School of Computer and Software, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing 210044, China (e-mail: src@nuist.edu.cn).
Jin Wang is with the College of Information Engineering, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou 225127, China (e-mail: jinwang@yzu.edu.cn).
and the demand for data publishing, sharing and analysis are also growing rapidly. People pay more and more attention to the security of data protection, and the government, enterprises, and individuals are also improving their understanding of privacy protection.
Body sensor networks (BSNs), as a special application of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) [1], are deployed on the surface of bodies for periodically monitoring physical conditions. For a typical social participatory sensing application, it is important to motivate participatory, at the same time, the participatory sensing process should not disclose the privacy information of any participating party (the private data) or the community (patterns, distribution, etc.). Therefore, it is essential to develop a privacy protection data strategy for the protection of the users and the community [2].
Devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) generate, process, and exchange vast amounts of security and safety-critical data as well as privacy-sensitive information, and hence are appealing targets of various attacks. To ensure the correct and safe operation of IoT systems, it is crucial to assure the integrity of the underlying devices, especially their code and data privacy, against malicious modification [3].
The privacy threats of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) [4] can be simply divided into two categories: privacy threats based on data and privacy threats on location. Data privacy issues mainly refer to the leakage of secret information in the process of data acquisition and transmission in Internet of Things.
Location privacy is an important part of privacy protection of the Internet of Things. It mainly refers to the location privacy of each node in the Internet of Things and the location privacy of the Internet of Things in providing various location services, especially including the RFID reader location privacy RFID user location privacy, sensor Node location privacy, and location-based privacy issues based on location services [3], [5].
Usually, data collected, aggregated and transmitted in sensor networks contain personal and sensitive information, which directly or indirectly reveals the condition of a person. If the data cannot be properly preserved, once exposed to the public, the privacy will be destroyed. Therefore, protecting the privacy of sensitive data is greatly important [6], [7].
Location data implies moving objects, spatial coordinates, current time, and unique features different from other data, which is discrete and of high value. Before the concept of big data, most of the privacy protection methods focus on a small
Chunyong Yin, Jinwen Xi, Ruxia Sun, Jin Wang, Member, IEEE
Location Privacy Protection based on Differential Privacy Strategy for Big Data in
Industrial Internet-of-Things
T
1551-3203 (c) 2017 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/TII.2017.2773646, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
2
number of non-positional data. There are some limitations for the protection of location data privacy in big data. There are two main reasons as follows: (1) Multiple data fusion by big data makes traditional anonymity [8], [9], [10] and fuzzification technology difficult to take effect in location privacy protection [11]; (2) Traditional cryptography technology takes little effect on the real-time analysis required by big data.
In summary, location privacy protection faces great challenges for big data in IIoT. Therefore, we propose a more rigorous LPT-DP-k location privacy protection method based on differential privacy strategy for big data in sensor networks.
Our specific contributions mainly include: (I) We introduce a tree structure to represent the location data
in sensor networks, which called LPT (Location privacy tree), according to the characteristics and retrieval difficulty of location data.
(II) The differential privacy strategy is suitable for location privacy protection because it is insensitive to the background knowledge and the DP-k (Differential privacy-k) model has better protection effect. Laplace and index mechanism are the main implementation mechanisms of differential privacy, which can show the degree of privacy protection by allocating the privacy budget and is relatively reliable and rigorous.
(III) We conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets which show that the proposed location privacy protection method can protect users’ location privacy without significantly affecting the privacy, availability, security, and effectiveness.
Section 2 presents necessary background and related work. Section 3 introduces the preliminary knowledge. Section 4 details the proposed location privacy protection method. The real-world datasets and experimental results are presented in Section 5 and conclusions in Section 6.
II. RELATED WORK In the process of data mining and data publishing, the
privacy protection of location data mainly involves two aspects: privacy model and utility.
A. Privacy Model In recent years, with the widespread application of location
services and data mining and publishing, location privacy protection model in location service can be divided into two categories: one is the traditional anonymous model based on grouping; the other is the differential privacy model that ignores the attacker’s background knowledge.
(1) Anonymous model based on grouping The traditional anonymous model based on grouping plays
an important role in location privacy protection. Samarati et al. [12] firstly proposed k-anonymity method and other a large number of methods based on k-anonymity [13], [14], [15]. Previous research [15], [16] shows that only using anonymous methods does not provide good protection to a wide range of data. According to [17], the encryption privacy protection method is proposed, which can completely protect the privacy of data and prevent the leakage of data in the process of location
service, but the availability of data is insufficient. The development of traditional location privacy protection technology has gone through three stages: the “informed and consent” method proposed by document [18] has been developed to deal with anonymous processing in a single location, and then to deal with anonymous processing of user’s trajectory data. Heuristic privacy measurement, probability deduction, and private information retrieval based technologies are common methods to protect location privacy. The heuristic privacy measurement method mainly protects the users who are not in the strict privacy protection environment, such as k-anonymity, t-closeness [19], m-invariance [20], and l-diversity. However, these three kinds of methods are proposed as a unified attacking model, which protect the location data under the premise of accumulating certain background knowledge. As attackers grasp more background knowledge, these methods cannot effectively protect the user’s location data privacy and the lack of privacy protection about the type of relational privacy protection method is proposed in [21].
(2) Differential privacy model Differential privacy model is a strong privacy concept which
is completely independent of attacker’s background knowledge and computing ability, and has become a research hotspot in recent years. Compared to the traditional privacy protection model, differential privacy has its unique advantages. Firstly, the model assumes that the attacker has the maximum background knowledge. Secondly, differential privacy has a solid mathematical foundation, a strict definition of privacy protection and a reliable quantitative evaluation method. In recent years, differential privacy model has been widely applied in privacy protection. Especially, the FM (Functional mechanism) is introduced in [22], in which an objective function of  -differential privacy disturbance optimization problem is used to protect privacy. The Diff-FPM (Privacy-Preserving Mining) algorithm is proposed in [23], [24], [25] and combined with MCMC (Markov Chain Monte Carlo), which provides privacy protection and maintains the high data availability while satisfying (   )-differential privacy conditions. The PrivBasis and SmartTrunc method proposed in [26] adopt differential privacy model in the mining process of frequent itemsets, ensuring the privacy and utility of data analysis and anonymity. The DiffP-C4.5 and DiffGen algorithm introduced in [27] combines differential privacy with decision trees and other data structures to maintain a balance between data privacy and availability.
In a word, differential privacy is an effective privacy protection mechanism, which protects the user’s location privacy while keeping enough useful information for data analysis.
B. Utility Maximization In the process of location service, data mining and data publishing need to protect location privacy and provide enough information for data analysis. Therefore, data utility is the core issue that needs to be paid attention to. Reference [28] uses compressive sensing theory to propose a perception mechanism
1551-3203 (c) 2017 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/TII.2017.2773646, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
3
to solve the published issue of statistical results, which can effectively solve the insufficiency problem of data utility, but it destroys the link among data. DP-topk method is proposed in [29], which has a more rigorous definition of effectiveness. But this method ignored the relation among transaction data, and because of its poor efficiency in data processing individually, the availability of algorithm is not high. To maximize the utility of the results and meet the requirement of location privacy protection, the paper proposes LPT-DP-k algorithm, which is a more rigorous differential privacy protection method, not only can guarantee the high availability of data, but also can enhance the usability of the algorithm.
III. PRELIMINARY KNOWLEDGE Differential privacy is a common privacy protection
framework that supported by the solid mathematical theory, which can provide privacy protection for data in the case that the attacker grasps the largest background knowledge. Definition 1 (Differential privacy)
Suppose there is a random algorithm M , MP is all possible output sets for M , for any given adjacent data set D and D (there is at most one different record between them),
1D D  , MS is any subset of MP . If the algorithm M satisfies the following inequality, the algorithm M will satisfy  -differential privacy protection.
     exp .r M r MP M D S P M D S           (1)
in which  .rP represents the randomness of the algorithm M on the data set D and D . Definition 2 (Sensitivity)
The differential privacy protection method defines two kinds of sensitivity, called global sensitivity and local sensitivity. Suppose there is a query function : df D R , the input is a data set and the output is a d -dimensional real vector. For any adjacent data set:
    1,= max .D Df f D f D   (2)
called the global sensitivity of function f , and f represents the maximum change value of the output results.
   f D f D is the 1-order norm distance between  f D and  f D . Definition 3 (Implementation mechanism)
Laplace mechanism and Exponential mechanism [30] are two of the most basic implementation mechanisms of differential privacy protection. In this paper, the Laplace mechanism is used to add the noise that obeys the Laplace distribution to realize the differential privacy. Assuming the privacy protection algorithm f based on the Laplace mechanism, the noise keeps to the Laplace distribution with the
variance f   is and the mean is 0. Then the probability density
function is:
 r 1P , = exp .
2 x
x   
     
(3)
in which x represents the specific variable and = f   .
If the algorithm f is proportional to the probability of
 ,exp 2
D r 
   
  to select from O and export r , then the
algorithm f provides  -differential privacy protection, the concrete formula is as follows:
     r ,
, = : P exp . 2
D r A D r r O
 

independent study project. 

Week 8 part 1

Complete a brief written summary outlining the proposed research methodology (quantitative, qualitative, action, triangulation) for independent study project.

Your summary will eventually be incorporated into the methodology section of your research proposal.

DO NOT USE BOOKS-INSTRUCTORS CANNOT VERIFY THOSE SOURCES.  Recommend you use articles from WU Library databases. (If you must use a book-copy/scan the selected content and provide that to your Instructor so that he/she can verify your resources).

Your summary will comply with the following general formatting requirements:

· Maximum of two (2) pages in length

· Typed using a 12-point Times New Roman font

· Double-spaced throughout entire paper

· Use a 1 inch margins

· Page header will include your title and page numbers

· Cover/Title page will include your name and the date of submission

project management

final project management 1

Semester Project Instructions
Overview
The semester project is a hands-on learning opportunity to reinforce the material learned throughout the course of this semester. The semester project work will allow you to bring to life some of the concepts taught during the course and galvanize your understanding of the material. In addition, the semester project work will provide you with practical skills and experience that are highly sought after in the work place. It may seem a little overwhelming at first, however, I will be your guide and I will be teaching you during your journey. This project will require a considerable amount of time to complete, so you should begin working on this by the second week of class. It will require that you conduct some research, apply newly obtained skills, and interact with your instructor. If you get stuck, remember, don’t spin your wheels or get frustrated – contact me for help.
Approach
· Each student will be assigned by the instructor to one project to work on (assignments will be available the second week of class – see full list below).
· You may work independently or select one other person in the class to work with. If you select one other person in the class to work with, both students must send the instructor an email by the end of the third week of class to confirm who their partner is and both students will receive the same grades for this assignment. Otherwise, I will expect you to complete your assigned project on your own.
· Research your selected project to fully understand it. You may do this by examining companies in that line of work or historical projects of a similar nature.
· Research the purpose and format of the various types of ‘project plan deliverables’ that you will produce (see below).
· Thoroughly review the materials that I have provided on Blackboard as a wealth of information is available that will assist you with your project.
· Communicate with your instructor on a regular basis as you will need to confirm your assumptions, gain clarity, and gather additional requirements
· Produce draft versions of your ‘project plan deliverables’ (see below) to share with your instructor as you progress to ensure that you are on the right track.
· Turn in the final version of your ‘project plan deliverables’ (see below) when they are due.
Project Plan Deliverables
1. Project Charter (Must use MS-Word or MS-PowerPoint)
· The project charter provides an overview of the project purpose and objectives (scope, cost, schedule)
· Project charters are an agreement between the client and the project manager as to what needs to be done, when, and how much it will cost.
· Project charters come in many forms, however, for this class I have provided the template that you must use.
2. Project Organizational Chart (Must use Visio or MS-PowerPoint)
· The project organization chart shows pictorially what roles are needed for the project and the reporting hierarchy
· Project organization charts differ from company organization charts. Company organization charts focus on formal position people hold within a company (i.e. Director of Marketing) rather than temporary roles people play on projects (i.e. Testing team leader, Project Manager, Construction Laborer, Quality Inspector, etc…)
· Project organization charts are a useful tool for team members to see where they fit into the big picture
3. Project Roles and Responsibilities (Must use MS-Word)
· Project roles and responsibilities describe what the specific duties are for each role on the project organization chart
· Project roles and responsibilities are a useful tool for team members to understand what they are expected to do during the project
· Project responsibilities are often bulleted one line sentences of a half dozen or more responsibilities that a role is expected to perform
4. Project Risk Register (Must use MS-Word or MS-Excel)
· Project risks identify what could potentially go wrong during the course of the project – not overall company risk.
· Generally this is in the form of a sentence or two which describes the risk and the impact (i.e. Management decisions are not made in a timely manner resulting in a delay in schedule)
· Your project should have a minimum of a dozen risks and they should be as specific as possible.
· Project risk management focuses on mitigation – minimizing the probability that a risk will occur and/or the impact if it occurs. It also focuses on contingency – what would you do if the risk actually occurred.
· Your risk register should include at a minimum for each risk identified: risk event description, probability, impact, risk response actions, and a contingency plan.
5. Project Schedule (MS-Project or MS-Excel)
· The project schedule is an organized list of activities that need to completed for a project set against a timeline to allow progress tracking
· The Project schedule must include descriptions of the activities, estimated durations, precedence relationships, start date, finish date, milestones and assigned resources.
· The Project schedule should include at a minimum 50 activities and a maximum of 100 activities using a work breakdown structure format and a minimum of 5 milestones.
Note: This is an opportunity to explore the use of Microsoft Project – which is a highly sought after skill in the work place around the world. However, it will require additional time and self-training on your part. I will help you along the way. If you would prefer not to learn or use Microsoft Project, you have the option to create your project schedule using Microsoft Excel.
Projects List

# Project Description Cost Duration
1 Construction of a small office building $5M 18 Months
2 Construction of a community park $3M 6 Months
3 Construction of a police station $15M 18 Months
4 Construction of an amusement park $100M 12 Months
5 Construction of a suspension bridge $100M 36 Months
6 Accounting software implementation at a medium-sized company $25M 18 Months
7 Development of a new experimental drug to treat asthma $200M 48 Months
8 Convert data center from IBM servers to Dell servers $30M 9 Months
9 Retrofit apartment building with new fire suppression system $15M 4 Months
10 Relocate historical school house to a new location 2 miles away $1M 3 Months
11 Construct a new McDonald’s restaurant $5 6 Months
12 Development of a new experimental drug to treat diabetes $200M 48 Months
13 Design and engineer a new all electric vehicle $75M 24 Months
14 Design and engineer a new 15 speed automatic transmission $35M 15 Months
15 Design and engineer an optical recognition automatic teller machine (ATM) $10M 18 Months
16 Customer billing system software implementation at a large-sized company $150M 24 Months
17 Construct 10 miles of a new expressway $100M 48 Months
18 Construct 60 miles of new pipeline to transport natural gas $75M 24 Months
19 Re-locate a major automobile manufacturing facility 50 miles away $135M 6 Months
20 Construct a warehouse for an automobile parts supplier $10M 12 Months
21 Construct a homeless center in Mexico $30M 24 Months
22 Inventory Management software implementation at a Large-sized company $20M 18 Months
23 Develop a new subdivision of homes in Lyon Township, MI $60M 24 Months
24 Build a brand new factory in Michigan to manufacture wind turbine blades $100M 36 Months
25 Host the special Olympics in Southfield, MI $5M 18 Months

Professor Allen 4

essence of management

Watch the video below and summarize it into at least 3 pages.

OB Skills What is the essence of management?

How do you INFLUENCE someone effectively?

The New World of Work: Complex, ambiguous, changing, diverse, and global

Success requires the SKILLS to react quickly and effectively while working w/ others domestically and internationally w/ new technologies

portfolio: valuable transferable skills carry from job to job

Company Success: What factors best explains a firm’s financial performance?

Firm size, market share, capital intensity, industry return on sales, ability of managers to effectively manage people

Which one is most important?Manager’s ability three times more powerful in explaining than all other factors combine

Modern Work Environment: Entrepreneurial success depends on managerial (social) skills

Downsizing/delayering

Job enrichment/empowerment

Self-managed work teams

Hiring for future positions now

Beyond work, OB skills serve you well in life

Expectations

Attribution Errors

Keys in Managing Perceptions and Attributions in Teams: Be self-aware

Seek a wide range of differing information

Try to see a situation as others would

Be aware of different kinds of schema

Be aware of perceptual distortions

Be aware of self and other impression management

Be aware of attribution theory implications

personality types

1. Does your personality type  make you more or less innovative? See first Personality document in  Course Document for some inspirations.
2. View the Utterback video
http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/15879-innovation-are-you-a-predator-or-are-you-prey
From the video, additional questions:
1) What do you think Utterback means when he says “functions are more stable than technologies?”
2)  Do you agree with his assessment that industries change their  structure over the course of an innovation’s life from symbiotic to  predator-prey to competitors?  Can you think of examples of this  evolution?

Quality In Long-Term Care

Quality In Long-Term Care

Disclaimer: Use of this tool is not mandated by CMS for regulatory compliance nor
does its completion ensure regulatory compliance.
QAPI Goal Setting Worksheet
Directions:
Goal setting is important for any measurement related to performance improvement. This worksheet is intended to help QAPI teams establish appropriate goals for individual measures and also for performance improvement projects. Goals should be clearly stated and describe what the organization or team intends to accomplish. Use this worksheet to establish a goal by following the SMART formula outlined below. Note that setting a goal does not involve describing what steps will be taken to achieve the goal.
[Example: We will increase the number of long-term residents with a vaccination against both influenza and pneumococcal disease documented in their medical record from 61 percent to 90 percent by December 31, 2017.]
1. Describe the business problem to be solved (Use the SMART formula below to develop a goal)
A. SPECIFIC
Describe the goal in terms of 3 ‘W’ questions:
· What do we want to accomplish?
· Who will be involved/affected (what staff, what residents, others)?
· Where will it take place?
B. MEASURABLE
Describe how you will know if the goal is reached:
· What is the measure you will use?
· What is the current data figure (i.e., count, percent, rate) for that measure?
· What do you want to increase/decrease that number to?
C. ATTAINABLE
Defend the rationale for setting the goal measure above:
· Did you base the measure or figure you want to attain on a particular best practice/average score/ benchmark?
· Is the goal measure set too low that it is not challenging enough?
· Does the goal measure require a stretch without being too unreasonable?
D. RELEVANT
Briefly describe how the goal will address the business problem stated above.
E. TIME-BOUND
Define the timeline for achieving the goal:
· What is the target date for achieving this goal?
· Write a goal statement, based on the SMART elements above. The goal should be descriptive, yet concise enough that it can be easily communicated and remembered. Use the example at the beginning for a reference on statement format and information.
Goal Statement:
Tip: It’s a good idea to post the written goal somewhere visible and regularly communicate the goal during meetings in order to stay focused and remind caregivers that everyone is working toward the same aim.
Page 1 of 3

Wells Fargo Fumbles Efforts to Repay Aggrieved Customers

article summary

Wells Fargo Fumbles Efforts to Repay Aggrieved Customers
Slip-ups impede bank’s efforts to compensate people who were charged improper fees after the Fed penalized it for sales-practice misconduct
Wells Fargo customer in Washington, D.C.
A Wells Fargo customer in Washington, D.C. PHOTO: PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
By
Gretchen Morgenson and
 
Emily Glazer
Feb. 10, 2018 3:37 p.m. ET
48 COMMENTS
Wells Fargo WFC 1.32% & Co. is having trouble doing right by the customers it has wronged.
The big bank acknowledged that it recently sent out 38,000 erroneous communications to customers that it forced to buy unneeded auto insurance.
In some cases, according to two people briefed on the matter, Wells Fargo has also sent refunds to people who weren’t the bank’s customers; notified those who were harmed of incorrect amounts to be paid; and told people of coming refunds though they had never gotten the insurance.
In another matter, Wells Fargo has yet to begin a broad-based reach out related to refunds for as many as 110,000 customers who were charged improper fees to extend interest-rate commitments they received from Wells Fargo on their mortgages, people familiar with the matter said.
Wells Fargo will soon require mortgage customers to agree to a refund through the mail before sending them money, and estimates half or fewer will do so, the people said.
Catherine Pulley, a Wells Fargo spokeswoman, said in a statement: “We are focused on making things right for our customers and ensuring this large-scale remediation happens correctly and as quickly as possible.”
She said a Wells Fargo vendor working on the auto-insurance matter caught a coding mistake that resulted in 38,000 customers receiving a letter they didn’t need with no checks included. Wells Fargo is working with the vendor “to ensure these customers receive the appropriate communication—including any refunds they’re eligible for,” she said. Ms. Pulley said the bank is currently aware of one non-customer having received a check.
The problem mailings and refund delays are happening as the bank continues to grapple with regulatory scrutiny following its sales-practices misconduct.
For those actions and others, the Fed earlier this month took the unprecedented action of restricting the bank’s growth until “it sufficiently improves its governance and controls.”
That punishment followed a rebuke issued to Wells Fargo last fall by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Citing repeated deficiencies, the regulator warned the bank that it would likely face enforcement proceedings because of them.
The OCC and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, another regulator, are aware of the refund delays with mortgage customers and have been pressing the bank about them, a person familiar with the matter said. The regulators have also been involved with auto-lending refunds, approving different phases of the mailings.
A spokesman for the OCC declined to comment. The CFPB declined to comment.
Last summer, the bank said it had forced nearly 600,000 customers who financed their car purchases with Wells Fargo to pay for collision coverage they didn’t need. The practices pushed 274,000 customers, among them active military service members, into delinquency on their auto loans, according to an internal report commissioned by the bank, and resulted in 20,000 wrongful car repossessions.
Consumers’ credit scores were also damaged by the bank’s insurance dealings. Wells Fargo’s insurance, similar to others offering that type of insurance, was typically more expensive than auto coverage its customers already had.
Wells Fargo has said it would provide cash reimbursements totaling about $100 million to customers and make $30 million in account adjustments related to the insurance improprieties. It tapped Epiq, a private company that administers regulatory settlement programs for banks and mortgage servicers, for help, people familiar with the hiring said. Wells Fargo gave Epiq a list of customers and addresses it was supposed to verify before the mailing went out, one of these people said.
An Epiq spokeswoman declined to comment.
Wells Fargo has sent more than 100,000 checks to auto-loan customers out of roughly 800,000 planned, a person familiar with the process said. It has been in close touch with the regulators about the different phases of customer checks and so far agreed on the refunding process for more than half of those customers, the person said.
The first phase was refunding customers who were owed less than $100, with average payments around $30, the person said. Later phases involved larger refunds and states that had more complicated legal processes. Another stage focuses on customers who claim lost wages and out of pocket financial costs because of, for example, a car repossession, mental and emotional distress or other issues. The bank is still sorting out what customers can claim, the person added.
Wells Fargo’s Ms. Pulley said the bank has focused on accounts with smaller refunds and requests for customers to send additional information so it can catch any issues if they arise. She said Wells Fargo expects these refunds to be complete by the second quarter of 2018.
Wells Fargo for months also has debated internally how to refund customers impacted by its improper mortgage charges. The bank is planning to send letters to customers who were charged interest-rate locks over a particular timeframe, people familiar with the process said. It already refunded customers on a one-off basis who complained directly to the bank about the fees.
With the bank’s planned broader outreach, customers must opt in to the possible refund, and then the bank will send a check, one of these people said. Since the bank is relying on customers to open their mail and get back to them, the bank estimates half or fewer will do so, in line with direct mail response rates, another person said.
The bank said in October that it expects refunds to be lower than the $98 million total that customers got in so-called mortgage rate lock extensions between September 2013 and February 2017.
Meantime, the bank’s auto-loan and mortgage operations aren’t faring well.
Wells Fargo’s mortgage business earned $928 million in fees in the fourth quarter, down 35% from the $1.42 billion it earned in same period a year ago. The bank’s retail mortgage loans fell 34% to $23 billion in the fourth quarter, down from $35 billion a year earlier.
In the third quarter of 2017, the most recent figures available, Wells Fargo’s average auto loan balances fell 9% to $56.7 billion from $62.4 billion in the same period of 2016.
Wells Fargo also could face regulatory scrutiny related to the sale by auto dealers of “after-market” products to car buyers, people familiar with the matter said. Such products include extended warranties, tire and wheel protection and service contract insurance to cover unexpected repairs.
When these products are added to a borrower’s loan, Wells Fargo earns interest on their costs that amounts to a significant business.
Financial regulators require banks to scrutinize the activities of any third-parties they hire to help in their operations. For example, the OCC requires banks to ensure that their outside vendors are complying with legal and regulatory rules, such as those involving predatory or abusive practices.

tax implications

using a modality of your choice. Explore four different types of retirement plans. Identify the following for each plan:

  • What are the tax implications?
  • Is the plan employer sponsored or an individual account?
  • What are the payout provisions/penalties?
  • What are the investment choices and do fees apply?
  • Investigate what plan you have at work and include your thoughts about its advantages and disadvantages?

Format your submission consistent with APA guidelines.