"Those should be conditions of the job," Nathan replied. "Not special favors."
The audit grew beyond Branch Twelve over the following month. Investigators interviewed employees separately, compared consent records with product enrollment histories, and examined whether regional targets had created similar pressures at other locations. The bank disclosed the concerns to its supervisory and consumer-protection teams and began a formal customer remediation project. It also established a separate process for employees who believed they had faced retaliation after raising complaints.
The first uncomfortable discovery was that Branch Twelve was not entirely unique. Several other branches had high add-on enrollment rates and weak documentation of consent, though the evidence of deliberate misrepresentation varied. Some managers had followed Douglas's presentations because they believed the methods were approved, while others had knowingly taught employees to make optional features sound compulsory. The distinction mattered because the bank needed to correct both the training problem and the individual choices without declaring every employee guilty.
Miriam's team created three categories for reviewing the accounts. The first covered transactions with clear evidence of unauthorized enrollment or misleading disclosures. The second covered cases where customer consent could not be reliably established because the bank's own records were incomplete. The third covered accounts where independent evidence showed that the customer had knowingly selected the products and had received the required information.
Nathan insisted that the bank not use the second category as an excuse to deny relief. Customers should not bear the burden of proving something the bank was required to document in the first place. Under the remediation plan approved by the board, those customers would receive appropriate fee refunds unless a valid, informed choice could be confirmed. Related charges caused by the original fees, including additional overdraft or maintenance consequences where applicable, would also be reviewed.
The bank made those decisions with outside counsel and compliance specialists because different products carried different legal requirements. Nathan had learned during the first week how easily executives could speak about refunds without understanding what had to be reconstructed. Some customers had moved, closed their accounts, or died. Others had received paper statements they no longer kept, and some needed help in languages the bank had never bothered to offer at Branch Twelve.
A retired teacher named Miriam Patel, who volunteered at the town library, helped the remediation team design a public information session that avoided technical language. She had been a customer of Reed National for nearly thirty years and told Nathan she did not want to hear another bank representative explain how complicated everything was. "If a customer can understand a parking ticket," she said, "you can explain a fee. The complication is usually in the part you're hoping they'll skip."
The comment was repeated in the bank's training materials, with her permission. Simple language became a practical requirement, not a marketing slogan. The bank hired independent translators to review disclosures used in the neighborhoods it served and asked community organizations to test whether ordinary readers understood the difference between a required term and a paid option. The people reviewing the forms were paid for their time, because Nathan did not want the institution once again expecting working people to repair its failures for free.