We should probably consider charging and trying them first.

That's a great suggestion. Unfortunately, press releases like TFA are seldom followed by criminal charges against executives. This is the big announcement, right here.

First you need to find them. It's not like those in charge leave paper trail that could pin responsibility to them.

You’d be surprised how often they do.

How do you prevent the execs from delegating decision making (on paper) to engineering, and then forcing them to make certain decisions?

C-levels should be personally responsible for the decisions "made by the corp". They will need to obviously add checks and verification to what happens inside the company and could not claim anymore they "didn't know" because it would be explicit that their role is exactly to know and respond for it. Simple as that

"Knew or should have known". If you're a C-level exec, and you don't know, it's your fault that you don't know.

This already occurs with SOX, it's definitely a workable model for processes and decisions not just impacting the finical statements.

In theory SOX only has benefits, but in practice the compliance costs due to it are very high. I'm sure some of that is for the better (bad oversight before SOX) but I can't imagine the insane paper tigers that come out of it are a net positive in the end.

One delegates authority, not accountability.

Looking at chat records.

There are already enough laws to put top executives in jails, it's just that the laws aren't used.

Don't forget about the regulators. Homicidal negligence.

At the very least fine could a MUCH higher percentage of annual profit. That would at least give the company incentive to fire people.

The number here ($2.5 billion) seems to be ~20% of Boeing's 2016 EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization) and ~18% of their 2017 EBITDA. It's ~700% of their 2019 EBITDA (they had a pretty bad year revenue-wise in 2019) and I expect they will have a significantly negative EBITDA for 2020 (it's -$4.6 billion for the 12 months through 2020-09-30).

Looking at historical trends at https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BA/boeing/ebitda it looks like it's something like 25% of an eyeballed "average year" for Boeing.

I suspect you're right that this is a little low given what was going on here.

Who would get fired though? It seems that it is more likely to affect those lower in the hierarchy.