[justinjoshuak]

That's not really what's happening here. Tax obligations under the law are not clear cut. There's ambiguity. The law is often general in nature and old. It may not be clear how the law applies to a specific business.

A large business could seek out the opinion of ten different tax professionals and get a range of answers of how much tax the law requires them to pay. Even the IRS may not be certain. It's not unusual or unexpected that a business may have a disagreement with the IRS on how to interpret the law. If the taxpayer and the IRS can't come to an agreement, then the only way to resolve it is to take it to court and force a judge to make a call - the ruling then at least provides certainty to other businesses in the same situation.

For most people, their experience of paying tax as an individual has little relevance to the tax affairs of large businesses. Since there are millions of individuals, for any area of the law that's ambiguous, someone has already challenged the IRS and had the matter resolved in court, providing clarity for other individuals. This is not true for some businesses as there may only be a handful of other businesses (or even none at all) in a similar situation.

[loeg]

This situation isn’t as complicated as you make out. They tried to pay the (lower) long-term capital gain rate for trades with short-term gains. Individuals face the exact same holding requirement and can readily understand that the lower long-term rate is intended to incentivize buy-and-hold investing rather than intraday trading.

[dailo10]

Except in this case they went too far and the IRS busted them - to the tune of $7B.

Let’s not pretend like they weren’t trying to get away with not paying their fair share of taxes here.

And to OP's point - if the punishment was in proportion to how much they tried to steal - well, you’d probably see a lot less “creativity” in these tax schemes.

[smabie]

Of course they were trying to minimize taxes, just like everyone else, individuals and corporations alike.

In this case it didn't work, but I don't see any parallels with stealing.