Make the CEO responsible, want those big rewards (high ceo pay) get ready to deal with big responsibility. I’m sure if CEOs were criminally liable things would change very quickly.
It’s the CEO’s job to ensure that sufficient measures are in place to prevent failure. They should not be punished for accidents; they should be punished if the accidents were reasonably predictable.
Which was most certainly the case when they decided to the redundant AoA sensor an optional extra.
Then drag him to court for that. But this is totally different to charging him with the crimes of other people he couldn't have known about.
From [1] in 2021:
> The airplane manufacturer broke the agreement by “failing to design, implement, and enforce a compliance and ethics program to prevent and detect violations of the U.S. fraud laws throughout its operations,” the DOJ said.
He’s not being held responsible for the crime, he’s being held responsible for looking the other way.
The CEO is 100% responsible for designing programs to ensure that the business operates within the parameters of the law.
What else do you think their job is?
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/07/doj-fines-boeing-over-2point...
Possibly, but not if it were a one-off. Are the airlines that chose to keep flying Boeing 737 MAX not equally (or more) responsible?
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that Boeing knew what was going on, and if the CEO didn’t know then he wasn’t doing his job.
There really is no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Boeing did not disclose the existence of MCAS to pilots, and therefore did not train the pilots on how to recover from MCAS failure, and there was no redundancy in the key sensors that fed MCAS.
IIRC at least one of the crashes was caused by an AoA sensor failure.
https://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-white-collar-crimina...
Your employees can be criminals regardless of culture. The precedent this would set is ridiculous.
The person committing that crime.
>If we want companies to have legal personhood, how about they suffer the same perils of breaking the law (prison time, etc)?
Companies can not be put to jail.
But that's not the situation here anyway. Is an architect guilty of murder if a building he designs collapses? Flaws in his design may have contributed. What about the construction company that built it? Perhaps they were incompetent and sloppy in their construction. The suppliers might be at fault as well; they could have sold inferior steel or concrete. What about the politicians that passed faulty legislation for building codes? Does some of the blame not fall on them too? Or the maintenance company that skimped on their maintenance checks and could possibly have seen the cracks forming?
There is very rarely, despite the assurances of five-whys and other incident response practices, a clear-cut and obvious point of failure when complex systems break. The Boeing situation was a failure of culture, people say. Maybe. They justify criminal charges on the C-suite as a result. Maybe even that is just, for a certain definition of justice. But the buck doesn't have to stop there. Where are the criminal charges for the shareholders, who chose to keep these criminals at the head of the company? Where are the charges against the FAA, who continued to do leave Boeing to be its own regulator? Why not cast blame on the previous CEOs as well? After all, culture takes a long time to change, and the current CEO has only been in the role since 2020 - the MAX's first flight was in 2016!
2) If the CEO knows, then the word "conspiracy" comes to mind, does not require them to perform the criminal act, only their agreement to act.