> No employee is breaking laws in an effort to further the objectives of a company
That's am absolute statement that employees are not to be held accountable.
> Responsibility isn't zero sum.
I totally agree. Doing a bad thing is bad. Ordering someone to do something bad is bad. Absolving someone who did something bad to fulfill your own twisted worldview is also bad.
Sure, but the more likely way in which these things go is: "Do what you have to do to make us pass those emissions tests" and "Get rid of that industrial waste" and so on.
No clear command to do something illegal but the employee is left with two choices: do something illegal or end up not doing what they were told to do.
Culpability is a thing that can be smeared out effectively across the layers of a large organization where each layer only sees the delta between the one above it and the one below it, the people that know the law and the consequences are safely (or so they think) insulated from the hands that commit the crimes and the hands that commit the crimes typically don't know the law.
This situation has - as far as I know - never really been addressed explicitly in the law hence the institutionalization of 'the buck stops at the top'. Even if you don't know and even if you did not order it explicitly you are - and should - still be held responsible. The question at hand is if that should include criminal liability for all cases where the employees break the law and I think there are plenty of cases where employees breaking the law should not lead to culpability of management, for instance, those cases where employees gain an advantage for themselves at the expense of the company, the customers or the society they operate in. But in most other cases where the company gained an advantage the execs should be liable. That alone will get companies to behave like good (immortal) citizens.
I don't think one has to order people to break the law. I think it's easier to establish aggressive incentive systems that encourages employees to act very single mindedly. I also think it's easy to undermine internal controls by putting incompetent people in charge who are easily intimidated with bad performance reviews.
It might be a bit much to require employees to break a law as it might expose individual employees to some legal consequences. But there are plenty of laws that are immoral. There are a number of good examples in the peer comments (some of the laws of Hitler's Germany for example). Any company manager or officer that insists on enforcing such laws is themself immoral. But it takes some skill to craft a company policy that could address the situation adequately.
I agree that both the people involved and the company should be legally liable in this case.
The important point to me about the company being liable is that a) the company itself benefited from the crime, and b) management knew about the crime happening; this wasn't a single rogue employee who did crimes and hid that fact from everyone else. (Contrast this to an employee using company resources, in secret, to commit a crime that only benefits the employee.)
And no consequences for the people involved means there's no deterrence. In the future, employees with unethical management will realize that they can do this sort of thing with little risk to their own livelihood, so why not give it a try?
Sure, but they need to ensure that their have training and audits/enforcement to ensure the policy works for everyone who isn't intentionally trying to cheat. If it was 1/a few employee(s) who didn't do the right thing, then that employee should probably go to prison for breaking the law. That is was most who didn't do the right thing suggests that the right thing was too hard to do, and it goes back to the company. (even if it is one employee they can make the case that they didn't understand the policy for some reason, which might put liability back on the company, but this is case by case)
What a silly and cynical comment. Most employers (the vast majority even!) aren’t looking to set their employees up to become criminals when they fail to follow company policy. Usually the goal of a policy is to have a fail-safe: where even if the policy is violated the law isn’t.
I'm not sure I follow your example but I'm sure it's better than the one given in the article, where an employee knowingly and deliberately facilitates fraud, begrudgingly, in order to collect a paycheck.
I agree that the labels aren't helpful, but it's vitally important to society that employees don't kid themselves about their responsibility (and culpability). Many employees are paid and treated abusively by their employers. Nonetheless, they cannot allow themselves to become instruments of crimes.
> No employee is breaking laws in an effort to further the objectives of a company
That's am absolute statement that employees are not to be held accountable.
> Responsibility isn't zero sum.
I totally agree. Doing a bad thing is bad. Ordering someone to do something bad is bad. Absolving someone who did something bad to fulfill your own twisted worldview is also bad.
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