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Comment by ergocoder | Hacker News Reader

Paying fine doesn't seem enough.

Someone needs to go to jail.

I hate this ridiculously unfair double standard. If someone costs a company money, we ruin their life. If a company ruins someone's life, we charge the company money.

If a cashier at a fast food restaurant takes $30 from the register, they go to jail. If a company steals millions from their workers paychecks, we slap them with a tiny fine.

In my opinion, which may be unpopular, a CEO who earns many times more than a regular employee should ensure that there are policies in place that prevent a regular employee or the "system" ruining a customers life. They should be held individually responsible if it can be proved in court that they ignored the issues.

Should the president of the USA be held responsible for some department of the US government ruining a citizen's life (which happens all the time)? What about a state governor, should they be responsible for all the state's agencies? How about a mayor whose police force or other department acts poorly?

I can't tell if this is sarcasm, so I will answer without sarcasm:

Yes, they should be held responsible (for some value of "responsible"). It is ultimately their responsibility, which goes along with the power they wield. It's what they signed up for. And this doesn't absolve the people who directly caused the issue. You want leadership to focus on ensuring that their delegates are competent and not corrupt.

There are some shades of gray here, of course. In the US, these leadership positions don't have absolute power. It isn't necessarily their *fault*. But it is absolutely their *responsibility*.

Yes and no. Responsibility should be held accountable to the level that it should. Would I paint a broad brush and say specifically the CEO? No. Sometimes the really bad decision happens at a departmental level or maybe it is the CTO and it never got to the CEO, the accountability needs to be there. When it is because of the CEO, then yes. The same rather happens in government. Government employees loose their job or can be removed from positions. In some cases, those government employees have gone to jail.

The only reason why we haven't had a president go to jail for crimes committed, at least for one congress has pursued is that the Presidents who were for sure to be removed (Nixon), resigned and was pardoned.

If the president of the United States is knowingly making a profit from the actions of a government employee and they do not interfer, then yes they should go to jail. The line is murkier when someone is just doing a bad job, but if someone is knowingly making money from illegal behavior they can easily put a stop to they should go to prison.

> If the president of the United States is knowingly making a profit from the actions of a government employee and they do not interfer, then yes they should go to jail.

This would be a great argument for abolishing the IRS.

No it isn't. Taxes don't go into the president's pocket.

Of course they should. If a cop makes a dumb move and the city gets sued then mayor should not be held accountable. However, if the mayor ignores police corruption, then I would love them to serve a prison sentence. They have the power, they must use it.

President should be responsible for things he can change, in US a president doesn't really have power to change everything as there are other parts of the government which are involved in decision making.

Any person in a position of power who can CHANGE policies or remove people and doesn't do so, which leads to further incidents and corruption that affect the population should be held accountable.

This will never happen, as powerful people don't want this.

Until we can get money out of politics nothing will change.

What is double standard? Who do you want to put in jail for this: front line employee? legal guy? finance guy? CEO? or all of them? Or is it just like "Some one need to go to jail, I just don't know or care who that will be and I do not have time for that"

So as per example your example the guy who filed the report be sent to jail even though he was following company policy, though in this case made a mistake. How it compares to cash register guy who was clearly stealing.

How about the person responsible for instituting this policy along with anyone who approved it?

They continued the practice after it was reported in the newspaper. It's reasonable to assume senior mgmt discussed major negative coverage of their company. That means the practice continued after senior mgmt was aware of it. That makes it their responsibility.

What should they have done instead? First, inform every employee of a new temporary policy that any report to the police about a customer purely about the theft of a car the customer had rented now has to be approved by a senior lawyer. Second, figure out the scope of the problem and how to fix it. Third, replace that unpleasant temporary policy with something more tailored once you understand what went wrong.

There's likely a paper trail of various people talking about this policy and what to do about it. Based on that, directly fine or imprison the people responsible for decisions about the policy that lead to people being falsely imprisoned. It's really not that hard.

It's ridiculous that corporations can always absolve themselves and their executives of responsibility because "well, who would we punish" or equally spurious arguments.

>"Who do you want to put in jail for this" - persons who allowed to put people in jail based on unconfirmed report. If I as a person go and complain to police that corporation stole money from me they would not just go and arrest the board / CEO.

Precisely. Nothing happens until the individuals responsible pay a penalty. If an exec knowingly, or through negligence, causes a person to be arrested, that person needs to pay up personally. If they did it to protect their own position, then jail time is appropriate. Falsely reporting a crime is a crime.

Qualified immunity makes some sort of sense for actual cops, perhaps, but makes absolutely ZERO sense for a corporation and its executives.

Just to be clear, corporations and executives do not get qualified immunity. They just get to pay with someone else's money (insurance, or shareholders) instead of their own.

I don't know why judges don't insist on jail time for someone in these situations. It might not make sense for a mistake that happened once, but after they knew it was happening and didn't fix their systems, the behavior was knowingly reckless.

They get an effective form of “qualified immunity” even if it’s not codified.

Any individual doing what Hertz is doing would be facing prison time.

Should be on the CEO's head unless they can prove it was someone's malicious action without their knowledge. At least that would partially exclude the ridiculous compensation

Dissolution of the company's charter.

You fuck up someone's life bad enough and often enough, you just don't get to be a company anymore.

Maybe there's a way to trick them into renting a Hertz car...

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