It has been shown repeatedly that boards won't do much and repeated fines are more and more just another cost of business. Either the fines need to be raised to a level where the company loses profit for one or more years or we need to go after individuals.

Don’t bother to fine them. They’ll just use that to punish employees and shareholders. Make the executives liable.

Agree about the executives but if the shareholders and employees feel enough pain they may actually do something. Right now the "punishment" doesn't cause anybody enough pain.

Shareholder pain will be slightly lower dividend or stock price. Employee pain will be unemployment. And I think that is what drives most of these low level fines. Regulators recognize the company wouldn't suffer in the short term from large fines.

I guess the fines will have to be much higher so the dividend is not just slightly lower. If employees knew their job is at stake they may also be less wiling to play along. I work in medical and we sometimes get pressure to cut corners but employees know that the FDA may shut down the whole thing so they refuse.

Shareholder can, and do, sue for damages from fines as the result of poor decisions by executives and the board.

Interesting -- are there some good examples of that happening?

The board of Google (that is, Alphabet) is currently being sued by shareholders: https://venturebeat.com/2019/01/11/shareholders-sue-alphabet...

Oh I definitely agree. Both should ideally be charged because these people were acting on behalf of the company and were in management positions, which makes the company legally liable for their actions.

But if I only get to choose one to charge, I go the individual route any day of the week because it reduces/removes the moral hazard of getting to shift your criminal activity to an intangible, legal entity like a corporation. Sure, you'd never get the $435M settlement from these people, but once everyone knows the government is coming after them personally, I would bet my last dollar that this type of crap virtually never happens again.

But that's half the problem - we never do. These kind of criminal charges result in a few million dollars worth of fines. It's never enough to really hurt a company the way that losing one year in jail hurts a person.

The cost was probably less than the profit in this outcome for each of the companies.