Hertz is going through bankruptcy proceedings. During this process, a court will prioritize which debts Hertz is going to be paying off, and in what priority. Some of these debts are people who have sued Hertz for these issues. The court will be determining who gets paid and whose debts are written off under bankruptcy law.
if a person fucks up, massive consequences. A company? I'm pretty sure the CEO and board got plenty of cash, and lots of protections against all their wrongdoings
If Hertz reports a car stolen because front desk staff made a mistake, that's simply not criminal. This also applies to you as an individual too. If you report your car stolen when you forgot where you parked it, that is also not criminal. Hertz is being treated the same as you would be.
I don't see anything in this story that describes a crime. (except for the people who may have actually stolen cars) These are descriptions of civil wrongdoings.
> Someone at Hertz is culpable for not taking steps to prevent this from happening.
Of course, this is what the 191 lawsuits are about. They are to determine Hertz's culpability in -- with what the article describes -- are the civil wrongdoings I mentioned in my above comment.
It's far from clear that anybody at Hertz is criminally culpable, which is what was suggested upthread, with talk of people making false statements being arrested.
The solution to everything isn't "lock 'em up and throw away the key". We have functional civil courts, and they are more than capable of remediating wrongs.
> We have functional civil courts, and they are more than capable of remediating wrongs
That's actually a good one. Thanks for the laugh.
As to why some states criminalize it... I don't know, too many years of voting for tough-on-crime politicians?
In every one I've heard of, it can (and eventually will, for varying values of 'eventually') get you arrested for grand theft auto.
I remember a recent rental car contract of mine that pointed out these specific state laws. e.g.: https://law.justia.com/codes/nevada/2010/title15/chapter205/...
If there’s some memo floating around that says otherwise, then maybe it’s a crime.
"Knowingly" and "willfully" have legally significant meanings with their own standards of the mental state that qualifies. It is then up to the court to determine whether or not your actions have met those conditions.
There has to be some abstraction layer between a company and its officers, or companies can't take the risk of delegating anything to employees. The reality of society is that sometimes something is going to get fucked up, and the dispute resolution process is expensive and messy. That's the legal system, and it exists for a reason. Ideally, most people don't have to use it very often, and the 0.001% of the time when something fails catastrophically, the pain of that one individual that it didn't work for makes society less painful for everyone else longer term. This person lost their real estate license, so that thousands of other people can drive someone else's car while they're on vacation without having to buy the car with cash outright. Net win? Probably.
To some extent, you can always reduce the risk of anything to as low as you want. It's just that at some point, the cost of that makes the entire endeavor not worthwhile financially. Risk aversion is a tax on innovation, so you don't want to become too risk averse. I think society has found a decent balance here.
Okay? Let's change the nature of business then.
> I think society has found a decent balance here.
People spending over a month in jail is the right balance here?
What's to say this isn't something that's going to keep happening? What's the incentive for a company to actually do the right thing?
Honestly fines for companies should be far, far higher. At the amounts of single to double digits percentage of the company's revenue.
Some people’s employers would be aware of a pending arrest warrant within hours, likely before they are. People get immediately suspended without pay and need to hire an attorney, etc to figure out wtf is going on. Depending on what happened, it could take months to restore everything.
I manage risk for a living. If a consumer needs to be worried about felony arrest when renting a fricking car, something is very wrong. I would assert that if the company’s incompetence in implementing, administrating, and signing off on controls is such that customers are being arrested because they can’t figure out wth their rental cars are, the executives should have Sarbanes-Oxley exposure and potential criminal liability.
Indeed, but it is not surprising. Despite all copaganda, police has always never been "your friend", but the armed enforcers of capitalism.
When a company files a police report, police are not going to question it. They will bash your door in, shoot your dog and/or yourself and/or your neighbors, ask questions later, and only pay for damages when ordered to do so by a lengthy court process.
And no, I'm not just polemic here, this is reality. There have been countless house "search and seizure" operations on people who had committed the "crime" of having their wifi hotspot unsecured, who have downloaded stuff from university libraries (R.I.P. Aaron Swartz), for running TOR exit nodes, or for exposing government or corporate "secrets" that caused scandals.
They only care about capital, they care about maximizing their KPIs (which tend to have far more to do with protecting the state and/or generating revenue) and getting paid. Their KPIs only reflect protecting capital as much as trickles down from the elected executives who are ultimately at the top of the accountability (or lack thereof) pyramid.
If enforcement cared directly about capital dangers to the public and crimes of possession would be taken a lot less seriously than they are and property crimes would be taken a lot more seriously.
Yes. If the CEO and board want the responsibility of owning a company then yes they should also own-up to fuck-ups by their employees.
If big companies don't want to be responsible for thousands of employees then perhaps it's time to split up the responsibilities -- and the compensations too.
But in this case, it seems like there are several hundred false reports over several years. It's so much, that Hertz was able to hand over a database of data related to it. This is negligence, they clearly know they are doing something wrong and they know it's harming other people.
If tens or hundreds of your employees are making false reports consistently over many years and you're not doing something to resolve it? I suppose the answer to your question is yes.
For it to be a crime, a single person must willingly make a statement that they know is false. Making a statement and being incorrect about it is not criminal. Knowing that other people have made incorrect statements is not criminal.
That being said, making mistakes that harms other people is a civil tort. And that’s why these cases are going to a judge now as mentioned in the article. It also worth noting that the article is about allegedly untrue reports of car theft. Whether or not those claims are accurate still remains to be tested in court.
The idea is that Mark would feel some sort of inconvenience if something was screwed up this badly, ideally, in light of the fact that he's receiving $16,000,000/year
They also get bonuses if the employees decide to do their jobs right.
If a single employee's actions can cause an innocent person to be arrested, the company procedures were clearly inadequate - in this case, a lack of a "four eyes" principle at car checkin/checkout and insufficient record-keeping and quality assurance of these records.
It is the job of the employees to do their tasks correctly... and the job of management to provide the necessary resources for employees to do their tasks and to implement procedures to catch and prevent (inevitable) human or machine error.
The organization which he manages does this on a regular basis.
If said person get immediately compensated to full extent and a lot more on top. If any record of being criminally charged and any trace of arrest / interaction with police in regards to criminal matter gets wiped out. Then maybe.
Otherwise fuck those vacationers. They're free to go and buy car or vote for the system that does not jail people for hint of offence.
"Thank you for your patriotic sacrifice, comrade customer."
You just failed Voight-Kampff test.