The executives who created and sustained the culture where this was considered acceptable should too.
Shall we jail every shareholder in Boeing?
Because that's what you're suggesting, and it sounds patently ridiculous.
That sounds patently ridiculous.
The culture comes from the top. It's super easy for them to allow people lower down to take the fall for something they pressured subordinates to do.
Shoot, just look at Wells Fargo last year.
The higher ups said that those lower needed to boost account signups, so, suddenly people found themselves signed up with accounts they had never signed up for.
But we blame those lower for following an order, even if it's an implied order, because they were the ones who did the deed. It was so hard to link Al Capone to murder they had to get him for tax evasion.
He called the shots, but others took the shots.
So, when you say that it's ridiculous to target those execs who are setting the standards which are causing these problems, these deaths, you got some screw loose up there friend, because those execs are getting paid hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of dollars, while those doing what they are told so that they can keep their job are just trying to eat and pay rent.
Without any real knowledge of this situation, I'm pretty comfortable saying that anyone reporting this isn't perpetuating the culture. But, let's not jump to conclusions...
For instance, if an employee of a company embezzles a bunch of money from either a customer or the company itself then the execs should typically not be culpable. But, if the execs themselves were the ones that ordered the employee to do this, either directly or through the 'nudge, nudge, wink, wink' method of communications (and there is corroborating evidence that this indeed happened, for instance the issues not being limited to single employees but being institutionalized) then yes, they should definitely be punished as though they themselves were the ones doing it.
It should not be possible for executives to use employees as a cut-out layer when crimes are committed.
or (and this often seems more likely) if the execs have not clearly instituted reasonably sufficient protocols to prevent X from happening...
They are the buggers abundantly paid for good governance, after all.
No clear command to do something illegal but the employee is left with two choices: do something illegal or end up not doing what they were told to do.
Culpability is a thing that can be smeared out effectively across the layers of a large organization where each layer only sees the delta between the one above it and the one below it, the people that know the law and the consequences are safely (or so they think) insulated from the hands that commit the crimes and the hands that commit the crimes typically don't know the law.
This situation has - as far as I know - never really been addressed explicitly in the law hence the institutionalization of 'the buck stops at the top'. Even if you don't know and even if you did not order it explicitly you are - and should - still be held responsible. The question at hand is if that should include criminal liability for all cases where the employees break the law and I think there are plenty of cases where employees breaking the law should not lead to culpability of management, for instance, those cases where employees gain an advantage for themselves at the expense of the company, the customers or the society they operate in. But in most other cases where the company gained an advantage the execs should be liable. That alone will get companies to behave like good (immortal) citizens.
That's why there is such a huge gulf between US law and EU law: in the US, the letter of the law is all that matters, in the EU, where laws are a lot more ambiguously specified it is the spirit of the law that matters. So an EU executive could be found liable because the company violated the spirit of the law whereas a US executive would walk even though both companies would do the exact same thing. But once the letter of the law is violated - especially in so-called white collar crime - there is still no guarantee of a conviction because corporations have very large budgets to protect their execs and to try to find some legal loophole.
I'm (very well possibly because I'm European) more in favor of laws that are interpreted as to the spirit of the law, simply because it makes people reason from some level of goodwill rather than by trying to maximize the take by legal hair splitting.
This is very wrong. In common-law jurisdictions (which the U.S. is broadly-speaking one example of - some exceptions may apply which are not relevant here), judicial precedent is a key factor in interpreting "the letter of the law", which is not the case in continental/civil law. This means that a vaguely-written statute can still provide some meaningful legal certainty in the U.S., where precedent provides some commonly-understood and commonly-developed guidance to what "the spirit of the law" might be; whereas in civil law jurisdictions, overly vague or ambiguous laws can only result in judges and government officials exerting arbitrary power (and in fact this happens routinely!), with not even consistency over time (much less some even more consistent "spirit of the law"!) as a real check and constraint.