> I think a lot of "normal" people like the idea of holding corporates accountable but how would that actually work?

Exactly which specific problem is "holding corporates accountable" trying to fix?

If it's that postmasters were being falsely convicted, then the way to fix that is to raise the burden of proof significantly. I hope this case has done that, and next time a court will not accept "computer says so".

With that fixed, the corporates would have to take the (falsely reported) losses; they wouldn't be able to pass it on to the postmasters like they did. Then the consequences of the problem will remain with the people responsible.

Is that sufficient?

No, it is not sufficient.

The problem is that it is possible to design malicious systems which through incentives, ensure that illegal acts will take place, yet only low-level actors are ever punished. The people who architected the systems and made the decisions statistically guaranteeing illegal activity escape punishment through plausible deniability and abscond with their ill-gotten gains.

Besides this scandal, see the failure to punish any executives after the 2007 crash, or Carrie Tolstedt and John Stumpf of Wells Fargo who even after clawbacks retired tens of millions of dollars ahead, etc.

Our animal brain doesn't perceive this situation as what it was due to the layers of obfuscation: a gang of vicious criminals kidnapped innocent people for months or years at a time, repeatedly, for decades, covered it up, robbed those people, ruined them financially, separated parents from children. Oh but they used perjury and fraud to get the state to do it for them. The mafia wouldn't even have the balls to do something like this. That is what actually happened, though of course, obscured behind layers of legalese and obfuscated responsibility it is difficult to get the emotional response it deserves to trigger.

The individuals need to be held accountable and do jail time. "Just doing my job" is literally not an excuse for breaking the law!

Everyone who knowingly covered this up at least committed fraud and/or perjury, or were accessories to fraud or encouraged or even financially remunerated people to perjure themselves(lower level people getting promoted for lying in court).

Their perjury led the government(in the name of us, UK citizens) into immorally, if not illegally, depriving other citizens of their liberty and money. If the legal framework to punish this as fraud does not exist, create it. If someone knowingly and with premeditation lies to the government and gets other people in trouble, they should get back that trouble sufficiently ramped up to act as deterrent. 10x 100x the fine, fine as percentage of lifetime net-worth whatever. If people knowingly and REPEATEDLY get people thrown into jail, all those people should be doing the amount of jail time they fraudulently inflicted on innocents. If the problem is the organized plausible deniability nature of the crime, I'm sure there's some racketeering or organized crime laws that are applicable. This whole thing literally became an organized crime organisation.

The CEO(s) at the time are the chief persons responsible.

If there are no consequences for harm, more harm will be caused. By not punishing wrong-doers and shortcut takers you ensure that more wrong-doers and shortcut takers will rise to positions of power, because they are able to outcompete ethical players.

White collar crime is literally destroying modern western society, if not in fact(though I believe in fact as well) then at least by ruining popular perception of our (necessary for a society to function) elites. We need to clean house.

You wanna make CEO money you're on the line for the problems you cause.

The quick and dirty way is to somehow tie their power/privileges/financial-situation to that of those who they have power over. (And make it stick for many years.)

There's a big missing culture of fixing problems in corporations. Which of course must start with acknowledging the problem. Which of course means that people reporting problems shouldn't face negative consequences. Which means that the current cultural gap is not just a nice empty void, it's an actively hostile roiling psychological chasm of corporate warfare.

So if random CEO knew about some problems that actively harmed the employees and did nothing, and later a court says that the company did wrong, the CEO automatically has to pay some fines too.

And it should be possible to share (but not completely delegate) this responsibility down the corporate hierarchy, to incentivize executives/VPs/managers/team-leads to do the right thing.

Of course this would need a political culture that is motivated to develop, fine-tune and enforce such a framework. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

one thing that ive noticed/realized is that perhaps associating hierarchy with division of labor/responsibility is perhaps an anti-pattern...

what if the ceo was responsible, but was working under the managers "for them" what if managers worked at the same level as thier team whos role is to make the team productive and support them (or even the team could fire thier manager) etc etc

i wonder if disassociating those two (responsiiblity/hierarchy) might be a step towards fixing these kinds of issues...

The concept of "Servant Leadership" is not exactly new [1], Many people are not in the position to argue with their boss when they frame it as an adversarial relationship - That you owe something to the boss for your pay, that it's somehow a privilege they are granting you to work for them. There's no way to prevent those kinds of leaders from having a successful organization except by refusing to work for them and out-competing them, and fundamentally: Crime does pay, sometimes for long enough to starve legitimate competition out.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership#History

Hm. My experience is that most of the time as responsibility is diffused in big organizations people are motivated to just stay quiet, weather the storm, don't rock the boat. And the typical "matrix management"-like organization structure (where everyone has many different managers, eg. there's a project manager, there's a technical manager (let's say engineering manager), there's a [human] resource manager, there's a team lead [a non-commissioned manager]) exacerbates this.

> even the team could fire their manager

This would likely help a lot with the Peter Pans who ended up promoted to managers but are terrible at managing.

At some (or perhaps more than one) point there was someone who was responsible for ensuring that the system put in place complied with requirements and that it was functioning as intended. They didn't do their job. They can point their finger any which way, but that won't absolve them of dereliction of duty.

That would QA department. And QA department is not exactly the most respected department in technology. I have seen numerous times where issues raised by QA are ignored, or even worse they get code to test 1 day before the release.

The issue lies with leadership. Start with CEO for creating a culture where safety and quality is ignored. Go down the chain only if there is considerable proof that someone under them ignored corporate orders and delivered buggy software.

I don't think the idea is to hold the "corporate" accountable. If it's true that the senior management at that time decided to cover up the failure and ruined the lives of hundreds of people, and knew full well that they were doing, they should be punished, even though they might no longer be working in the company. Simple as that.

Apply the same criminal liability that applies to boards, CFOs and CEOs for financial statements for all other statements?

That's fine, but Sarbanes-Oxley only applies criminal penalties for knowing or willful mis-statements.

Blame lies with CEO. Unless CEO can show there was insubordination that is CEO wanted to do the right thing but director ignored CEO and ordered their reports to ignore CEOs orders.

One interesting idea is to have a corporate "death penalty", although that wouldn't necessarily work here as well because it's not a private corporation.

The problem was people lying about the quality of the evidence. There's nothing exotic about prosecuting people for lying to investigators or courts.

CEO and senior executives are paid to take responsibility of the actions of their subordinates, otherwise why would they get the big bucks?