- Pay the tax we think you owe, or go directly to jail
- if you can prove later that you overpaid, we will give you a rebate on taxes over the next N years
- if the government is consistently getting your tax estimate wrong (in your view), then perhaps your tax-avoidance games aren't such a good idea after all
Did Apple not pay the taxes they owed? I ask because my reading of the article is that Apple did in fact pay all the taxes owed to Ireland, and the issue is actually about an EU internal disagreement over corporate subsidies and how they relate to tax policy.
In other words, none of that has anything to do with the topic at hand.
CEOs should be personally liable for a company's crimes. After all they are getting billions of dollars in bonuses.