A better case is: you are a healthcare worker. A federal agent asks you about your ex-employer. You always had a bad feeling about that company but you put in your 40 hours for your paycheck and kids' health insurance. Perfectly willing to help the investigation, you answer truthfully. You are asked about a co-worker you slept with after you had met your girlfriend, but before you started dating. Your girlfriend is in the room. Thinking it doesn't matter and not wanting to discuss it with a stranger in front of your girlfriend, you lie. Turns out the co-worker was involved. If the prosecutor decides he doesn't like you, congratulations you are now a federal felon. You don't even need a fun story about a personal relationship: say you misremember something. Or someone else does, and contradicts your truthful story but the feds think you're the one who's lying.
Also I'm not sure the label "criminal" is a useful one. It's almost certainly the case that every adult US citizen is a criminal. They simply haven't been caught yet. Every modern US president has admitted in public to being a criminal (drugs). The expanse of laws is so vast, vague, complex, interpretable and arbitrary it's impossible to not break one. If there were consequences for every lawbreaking act, everyone would be in jail and there would be no-one left to prosecute or to do the prosecuting.
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.
To be fair, the statute does say you must knowingly and willingly be lying. Theoretically, that would be on the feds to prove. Of course, I don't think it's possible to prove whether someone knows something. But if they can prove that you at one time did know, or with a perfect memory should have known... I don't know how that works. Would it be a coin flip at that point whether the jury would believe that you simply "misremembered"?
1. Worked with you.
2. Is neck-deep in the criminal enterprise.
3. Is testifying for the promise of leniency of immunity.
4. And is quite happy to throw the CEO, the CFO, and, since the FBI asked him about your name, you under the bus.
Regardless of whether or not his claims are true, he will be happy to testify that yes, you absolutely knew about the criminality, because you discussed it with him at lunch, and did nothing about it.
This may, or may not be true. He may or may not have misremembered this conversation. He may be trying to save his ass. Either way, it's your word against his, and the prosecutor, who pleads to the jury that there is no possible way you didn't know about your involvement.
You may well be found innocent, but you never want to put yourself in this position. Talking to the police is just giving them more rope to try to hang you with.
Harvey Silverglate, a Harvard law grad who works as an attorney, estimates the average American commits three felonies per day. He published an entire book on the topic[1]. The number is probably a lot higher for people who have built or served as directors of a company.
1) http://thinkaboutnow.com/2016/07/average-americans-commit-3-...
The most commonly commotted one is lying to an employer to claim a paid sick today... And frankly it's unclear to me why people thing that's acceptable, but taking $100 from a convenient store cash register is not.
Another common one is people borrowing parents from their parents to make a down payment on a house. Lots of people do it, but the sentence for using such a loan and not disclosing it is 30 years.
This particular violation is referred to as a "head shot" by investigators looking for something with which to nail a suspect.
http://davidsimon.com/kwame-brown-another-federal-case-anoth...
This doesn't detract from your point! Any felony conviction is a nightmare for someone just trying to build up a down payment for a house! But the way we talk about sentencing needs to be more sophisticated.