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Comment by DominikR | Hacker News Reader

Wells Fargo has 265.000 employees. A CEO certainly has to make sure that there's internal oversight according to regulations and industry standards but it's not his job to personally go spying on people (try doing that on 265.000 employees) or implement the Wells Fargo Gestapo.

If it cannot be proven that he knew about it or encouraged this behaviour then he cannot be held legally accountable. It's like demanding the US president should go to prison because some CIA team somewhere does some really shady stuff that he doesn't know about.

Shareholders might still choose to fire that guy, but it's a choice they have, they do not have to if they are satisfied with his performance.

How come that people today lose their ability to reason as soon as bankers are involved? It's similar to the National Socialists reasoning when they blamed the Jews for everything bad "because they had the all money and controlled the world"

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Who can then be held responsible when a big company commits criminal acts? Maybe they should arrest all people who opened those fraudulent accounts. All of them. Maybe that will be a deterrent.

But in general a CEO should have a duty to ask questions why a certain division seems to be doing well. Maybe it has to do with earnings targets that are simply unachievable? I see that in my own company. The top guys are setting shorter and shorter deadlines and in my view the quality of engineering suffers. Top management doesn't technically know when people are cutting corners but they could easily have listened to people that the demands are too high.

> Who can then be held responsible when a big company commits criminal acts?

My opinion: Anyone who took part in it either knowing it is illegal or even if the person should have known it is illegal considering his/her position.

Same goes for persons that didn't necessarily know about it but acted negligent or ignored standard procedures that are in place to prevent such a thing.

> But in general a CEO should have a duty to ask questions why a certain division seems to be doing well

Could be negligence, I don't know the specifics here. If it was then he has to be held accountable. But his head might roll in the end regardlessly as people always need a scapegoat, no matter if it's his fault or not. Yet when the government takes action it should not do so just to punish a scapegoat, they should punish because the person broke a law. (if the shareholders fire him even though it's not his fault I couldn't care less, it's their investment and they do not have to act rationally if they want to)

> My opinion: Anyone who took part in it either knowing it is illegal or even if the person should have known it is illegal considering his/her position.

As a general rule, we don't hold people criminally liable for simple negligence.

I did not say "simple" negligence, that is determined by others who know the specifics of this case.

Criminal law makes a distinction between gross negligence (locking the doors to a busy club so people can't get out which then catches on fire and kills everyone), and ordinary negligence (securing a heavy thing in the air with just a knot that falls and kills someone). Even if someone "should have known," that is almost never enough for criminal liability.

Thanks I know, I said that I don't know the specifics and that others (lawyers) will have to decide on that.

As a general rule, knowing that something is illegal isn't part of the required mental state, even for acts that require doing something "knowingly"; that usually refers to knowing the specific facts that make the act illegal, not knowing the law under which those acts are illegal.

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