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Comment by ivan_gammel | Hacker News Reader

Corporate negligence that results in significant damage to environment or public health must be criminalized with most severe punishment going to higher level decision makers, including some accountability for their superiors. If CEO knew and acted against public interests, then Board must be held accountable. If board knew and acted against public interests, then majority shareholders who voted for this board must be at least fined.

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Not just that the CEO or board "knew" because that is a hard thing to prove. Better to have it be "reasonably should have known". If this is a thing that the company is doing and has been doing for a long time then the senior managers should know about it and are therefore liable and responsible. Such a rule would also incentivize managers from 'looking the other way' at wrong-doing because the saying 'I didn't know' won't matter.

This is very important. Each time there is a leak of a bunch of personal data companies whip out the "we have not found any evidence of the leak being ours" or something to that tune, which incentivizes them not look for evidence.

It often feels like the only requirement to be an executive at a large corporation is the ability to create plausible deniability via willful ignorance.

CEO on stage at a trade show: "Look at all these great things my company has done! Let me share with you all the details!"

Same CEO during a deposition: "I have no idea what my company even does! Do we make soup or something?"

Ironically enough, the government has been moving in the opposite direction - No fault compensation schemes like NCVIA, anti-lawsuits bills like PLCAA, limits on torts.

I do wonder why? Must be Big Business (in the NCVIA case, Big Pharma), right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

Ah, so the regulators should share in the punishment when wrong doing is found, not just the CEO's.

Don't threaten me with a good time.

This is how it already works in e.g. foreign bribery for UK and US companies.

Executives just “letting” it happen is a crime, they have to explicitly ensure employees are educated and told not to do it.

Source: I worked in finance where we had tons of such useless courses.

I agree with the sentiment here, education is needed and finance / bribery is a good example. At a certain point though, you have to wonder what is wrong with society where "Don't kill a bunch of people through negligence" becomes something that needs to be educated.

perhaps it relates to a concept of LD50 in chemical testing.. that is, run tests and show a distribution of content and application, that results in "greater than fifty percent" fatality or "less than fifty percent" overall mortality.. continue to evaluate through the entire market system..

No action or formulation is one hundred percent pure and beneficial, though many actions or formulations are certainly one hundred percent fatal, now or over time. This is true in products created by companies, and markets push towards maximum profitability, not maximum safety.

The thought experiment of that there is a button and if you press it then you get $1M, but also a person you don't know somewhere far away dies. Turns out lots of people will press that button all day long. "Reduce worker safety conditions" PRESS!, "Dump cancer-causing waste in river" PRESS!, etc.

The buck can and should stop with the executive level anyway. They are paid extremely handsomely, in huge disproportion to the rest of the staff at their company, in part because fucking up at this level means you won’t see the C level again for a long time. It’s the ultimate accountability in the organization.

The accountability piece rarely happens now, unless you happen to defraud other investors, yet the compensation for the job continues to grow wildly out of proportion.

Hard disagree. High level executives are ultimately responsible for everything that happens, and must suffer the consequences - I really want to see C-levels regularly being sent to jail for the crimes comitted by the companies they led - but the low-level employees that actually performed the dangerous/illegal/immoral acts aren't magically innocent because someone higher up ordered them so ("just following orders" is not a valid defence).

Example at Boeing: the CEO and all related high level execs that fostered a culture of bean counting and cutting corners to save costs are guilty and liable for deaths. The actual people that designed a deadly system, those who approved it; similarly, those that forgot to put in bolts holding critical stuff together... they are guilty too. They knowingly endangered human lives.

I think we both agree, you just went into more detail on it.

The executive level shouldn’t be able to defer all of the accountability to employees lower down the ladder (e.g blaming it on an intern or whatever usual CYA excuse is rolled out). It’s one thing for an employee to go rogue, but totally another thing for leadership to either brush it under the rug or to create the environment for such behaviour in the first place.

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