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Ok, if I steal a $300 TV, and get caught do I have the option to simply pay a $900 fine? Seriously, that's a heads I've made 30k, tails I lose some of my savings account. For people in this position that is all the penalty they received is. Worst case they extend their mortgage, which is already likely many times this fine and so the extension is of minimal impact. But also the people who commit fraud that takes out hundreds of millions of dollars (corporate collapses, etc) do make large amounts of money, and can plead poverty as a defense against full compensation. e.g. When Enron collapsed, few of the people responsible were jailed, and in fact were giving themselves bonuses mere days before it collapsed. So it lost people $45 billion directly attributable to fraud, and emptied its regular employee's 401ks and pension funds. The victims whose 401ks and pensions were emptied won all of $85 million of the $2 billion that was stolen, and investors got 11 billion. So they stole billions, repaid a quarter of that, and few actually went to jail. Of the fraction that were sent to jail I can't find evidence that they had to return any of the 700+ million in bonuses they received in the year leading up to the collapse, let alone the prior fraud based bonuses. |
As another commenters have mentioned, the SEC doesn't have authority to bring criminal changes. That's on the DoJ. Therefore the rest of your rant about how people aren't being punished doesn't really apply.
Also, according to US federal sentencing guidelines, insider trading actually gets you harsher punishment compared to theft[2], 2 more points to be exact. For the duo mentioned in TFA, it's a difference between 10–16 months (for theft) and 15–21 months (for insider trading).
>e.g. When Enron collapsed, few of the people responsible were jailed, and in fact were giving themselves bonuses mere days before it collapsed. So it lost people $45 billion directly attributable to fraud, and emptied its regular employee's 401ks and pension funds. The victims whose 401ks and pensions were emptied won all of $85 million of the $2 billion that was stolen, and investors got 11 billion. So they stole billions, repaid a quarter of that, and few actually went to jail. Of the fraction that were sent to jail I can't find evidence that they had to return any of the 700+ million in bonuses they received in the year leading up to the collapse, let alone the prior fraud based bonuses.
Can you reference specific cases here? It's easy to point at a giant organization where Something Bad happened, and demand that everyone involved be punished, but that's not how the justice system works. You can't enact some sort of collective punishment for everyone involved with enron, you have to prosecute each person individually for the specific offenses that person committed. I suspect the reason for the lack of fines is that they didn't actually do anything illegal, or that they were difficult to prosecute, not because it's legal to defraud people.
[1] https://www.ussc.gov/guidelines/2021-guidelines-manual/annot...
[2] https://www.ussc.gov/guidelines/2021-guidelines-manual/annot...