Random spot checks of declared safety incidents + serious penalties for fraud (which this is if the companies are lying about safety incidents to avoid paying out compensation) is probably sufficient without changing any regulations in any meaningful way. No regulation is perfect but it’s quite surprising how effective regulations become when you start spot checking whether everyone is being honest.

Are you describing what food agencies do with their pseudorandom inspections? Because indeed those seem to work very well at a relatively low cost.

Sure that’s one example but I think there’s various things like this. You have to make sure that investigators can also be made undercover where makes sense (if it’s possible to obfuscate malfeasance) and rotate the inspector’s physical location (to avoid potential for corruption due to personal relationships). You always still have other corruption vectors (eg getting buddy buddy with the inspector’s boss and influencing them indirectly). It’s an unsolved problem but you can always do better than nothing.

Under what basis do you have to claim those "random" inspections "work very well"

Personally I believe they do almost nothing. Food born illness is pretty common and almost impossible to trace unless it is a wide spread outbreak.

Many cities only inspect a food establishment every 2-3 years and in some cases as long as 5 years.

I think reputation, and economics play a larger factor in safety then government inspections. Dirty places making their customers ill tend to close long before the government inspectors come around.

What country are you referring to?

Given we are in a topic thread about the US State of NY, about a Law in NY State. I am referring to the US, and Specifically NY which has been famous for their health dept in come cases not inspecting places for years

Gotcha. My only experience is with Ontario. Fair to assume we were sticking to NY. :)

Ok. But a state being disfunctional in a specific way surely means we should be looking externally for places where it’s not that disfunctional to figure out how to fix the disfunction. No? Am I taking crazy pills?

Penalties need to include individuals and not just companies.

Enforcement, transparency, and accountability are critical to regulations working correctly, which is why companies lobby against them at every opportunity. If they can get a toothless regulation on the books companies and politicians can all pretend something has been done to address the problems while the people can continue to be endangered/exploited.