Toyota's Daihatsu to halt all vehicle shipments as safety scandal widens

My argument can be expanded to the fact that if a “rogue underling” did this without C-level input that leadership at the company is negligent at the least, or attempting to abstract responsibility and hide the issue behind deniability at the worst.

Addendum: I should have picked a better phrase to start with. I agree that the legal process is the correct way to proceed, but once a determination of culpability is made, hiding behind layers of leadership should not be the defacto norm.

The current system isn't working, it's producing too much abuse.

The CFO is one example. Bery specific duties, responsibilities, and can pverride anyone on certain things.

We need more of this. Privacy, security officers woth specific duties. Same with anything such as safety.

Sure you can: if you have accounting fraud the CFO is liable, and the only question is whether it’s for deliberate fraud or negligence but in either case the buck stops at the top. The reason why such charges are uncommon is because those people tend to be politically well-connected, not because it’s impossible to come up with a regulatory solution.

That's the usual reason given for not imposing a corporate death penalty.

The problem with that argument is that it makes it so nobody is ever responsible, competition must act the same or risk losing to the misbehaving competitors, and all you have to do to be above the law is have employees, investors, and misbehavior complicated enough to be difficult to understand who is responsible.

You also end up punishing ordinary people who did nothing wrong.

A better punishment is putting the company under receivership whose goal is reforming the behavior of the company.

If you can identify the right people you can fire them, but it's not always possible: The manager pressures the employees to deliver better results, the employee cheats "a little", and doesn't tell the manager that that's how he got results.

In that scenario who is responsible? The manager will say "I didn't tell him to cheat, and I didn't know he did it", the employee will say "it's not my fault, the manager set such expectations that he forced me to cheat".

There's no clear answer, so instead focus on reforming the culture.