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Comment by jeltz | Hacker News Reader

It was investigated, the issue is that the fines are smaller than the profit. I would personally want to see things like this considered fraud and that it can result in prison sentences for executives and other people invovled in the decision making.

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Ya the problem needs to be a fine the first time, second time it’s fraud. Allow for honest mistakes. Punish for clearly defrauding customers. We really need jail time for execs making these decisions but that rarely happens.

Corporate fines should all be percentages of profits.

Pretty trivial to make profits "not exist" though if you planned to engage in fraud and wanted to de-risk it.

They're a publicly traded company. If they drop profits substantially, I imagine shareholders etc would leave.

I'm pretty sure GP was suggesting a general enforcement framework, not talking about any particular company.

Anyway no, shareholders care about much more than simple profits.

Explain, please.

I ask because I've never invested in a company that wasn't very profitable. I'm trying to find out besides intense insider information why someone would. (I'm not VC clearly, just a retail investor.)

Explain how people care about more than just profitability?

If they didn't, everyone would be invested in the single most profitable company on the market, which they're not.

There are unprofitable companies people are perfectly willing to buy.

Growth, absolute revenue, rates of rates of change are all relevant depending on what you care about.

All the above. Plus it is absurdly simple to manipulate profit up or down.

For example, as an owner, I can be paid a bonus, or not. Crumbs, I can be paid a salary or not. If I want profits high, I simply take a low salary and no bonus. Or vice versa if I want profits low.

But that's the tip of the iceberg. Buying an asset this year, depreciated over the next 5, means higher profit this year, and 4 years of lower profit.

Marketing expenses this year, benefits next year, and so on. Drop the head count to juice profits for a couple years, raise head count to drop it, and do on.

Profits are the easiest thing to manipulate and hence the worst metric for fines. Which is why you see Europe use Revenue (not profit) as the measure for some fines.

Yep, not to mention what you can do with complex conglomerates. For example, one should take a look at the intra-company eliminations that the giant pay-viders do (e.g. UnitedHealthGroup, owner of insurer/payer UnitedHealth and healthcare provider Optum)

Insurers are margin-capped, but wouldn't you know it once you own a PBM and the providers, you can make revenue, holdings, pricing power, and market share rise arbitrarily while never producing a profit beyond the cap.

This is why GDPR fines, say, are a percentage of _revenue_. Harder to mess with without getting into outright fraud.

Yeah agreed this seems more directionally correct.

Percentage of global tärevwbue works. We know that from GDPR. But I would personally prefer prison sentences for the execs.

Revenue, not profit.

Or revenue?

If movie contracts are any lesson, you always want to be on the gross. Too many ways to game the system otherwise.

And that only works because the theatres aren’t controlled by the producers. Revenue recognition is its own field of ripe fuckery.

God yes

You want prison sentences for execs if you were charged $1.50 for a can of corn instead of $1.45? Surely you can't be serious.

If there’s a paper trail showing they authorized it, and the total amount of fraud is enough for felony charges (a few thousand bucks, I think), then yeah, throw their asses in prison, and make them refund the money they had the business steal out of their personal funds.

I’m all for limited liability corporations, but if there is a smoking gun that shows you intentionally engaged in criminal activity, that should pierce the liability shield.

Do you honestly believe a senior exec at a company specifically said to charge the customer more than what the price on the shelf says? Chances are, in the world of computers and automation, mis-pricing just happens. Its a chance we all take as consumers. You just have to be mindful when shopping.

I don't know about you, but shopping at major grocery stores I have rarely been mischarged and I check my receipts/final price pretty religiously. If Dollar Tree consistently overcharges people then there should be an investigation, discovery and jail time if they willingly enable fraud. And given that this entire thread is about how they frequently overcharge people I think it matters.

Why, yes, I actually do. Just like BMW execs specifically instructed engineers to cheat at emissions testing.

And last time I checked, you don't get to just say "oopsie woopsies, I only accidentally committed fraud of a mass scale exclusively in a way that benefits me for a prolonged period of time that would obviously show up on books and intentionally hid it until caught" and get out of punishment.

If I break the law, I get arrested. Or am I allowed to "accidentally" try to carry out a new PC from Best Buy several times in a row?

For all intents and purposes “mispricing” doesn’t just happen widely. This is a policy problem with the stores. The difference between an accident and fraud is intent - it’s pretty clear there’s systemic intent here.

> do you honestly believe a senior exec at a company specially said to charge the customer more than what the price on the shelf says

Yes. I 100% believe that a policy from management of a retail chain owned by PE would say “charge the till price not the sticker price”, and also separately “our policy is to ensure all prices are consistent by doing a price audit of every stickered item once per 6 months”. All that does is allegedly ensure they’re not ripping people off two days a year.

If you really believe 5 cent transactions never amount to significant consequences why don't you send me 5 cents a million times.

OK, and the next time you defraud your employer by $0.05 (take a longer break then needed, arrive late to work, etc) then you should spend the rest of your days in prison. Fair is fair, right?

You're really missing the point here. If I defrauded a million companies for $0.05 yeah throw me in prison. If Dollar Tree defrauded a single customer of $0.05 that's very different than doing it millions of times.

Why is incarceration suddenly not an appropriate possible punishment for theft if it is done by someone in a suit. These are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars being swindled from poor people. Not a single 5 cent mistake as you try to make it out to be.

If it’s being done systematically, and, er, well, it certainly sounds like there’s a case to be answered there, then, well, why not, after a proper trial?

Like, imagine if your bank randomly took a few percent extra off each transaction. Someone would get in a lot of trouble for that, and at a certain point “we’re not doing fraud, we’re just staggeringly incompetent” won’t cut it.

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