alt Hacker News"Any individuals doing the same would have been charged with criminal damage."
We see too much of employees, CEOs, boards etc. doing unacceptable stuff and riding roughshod over everyone and then hiding behind the protection of their corporations.
Statutory fine amounts are often set to be effective in normal circumstances, individuals, small and medium businesses, etc. but they're just small change to a large corporation. Clearly, the way around this is to strengthen laws so both corporations and their employees are fined.
Corporate fines should be set as a percentage of turnover to a level where it actually hurts the offending corporation (its shareholded profits, etc.), also the individual perpetrators within the corporation would be charged separately.
Much of this shit would stop if those responsible were hit with large fined and or thrown in the slammer. Being individually liable ought to send shivers down their spines, they'd then think twice before acting.
It seems to me the only reason the Law doesn't make effective use of this 'dual' approach to enforcement must be threats from Big Business to lawmakers to the effect that employees would be less inclined to make decisions thus it would stymie buisnness as a whole (large sectors of the economy would suffer with reduced profits etc.). If not, what else is stopping lawmakers from acting?
It's time laws were strengthened thus, we desperately need ways to reign in these wilful cowboys.
Government beurocracies acting under the status quo will never reign this sort of abuse in of their own accord because doing so would be suicide for their own power. The exact same laws, precedents, etc that let CEOs not go to jail are leveraged to great extend by government agencies and the agents thereof so the government will never bring the cases needed to reverse the precedents. The solution must be legislative, so there must be public interest and political will that legislators seek to pander to. There isn't the interest or will to reign in the government, people want them to be able to ride roughshod over perceived wrongdoers. And there isn't political will to write legislation that has a double standard of formally exempting government activity. So the local minimum we're stuck in is that bad actors can "do whatever" as long as they do it as part of their day job and don't leave a flagrant paper trail.