[pjc50]

This is one of those cultural transitions which is difficult for people on the other side to understand; it belongs to the forgotten era of personal honor. These days one would simply lie on TV, or hire a PR firm to do that for you, and of course put the blame on the lowest individual that can be found. Repeat when more mistakes are made, because low level employees are disposable accountability shields. (See, for example, the UK post office/Fujitsu Horizon scandal)

But it used to be the case that leaders were expected to take responsibility for the culture and systems underneath them, rather than just taking as much of a salary as the business will bear from it.

That is, if a low level employee makes a significant money-handling mistake on this scale, that's a systems failure. There should be checks and testing and a software development culture which makes this kind of error unlikely. This is what was lost with "move fast and break things". After all, it's only other people's money.

(edit: it seems not to have been an actual money-handling error, but a notification error. Still fairly serious in terms of angry customers)

[tialaramex]

In the public enquiry for the Horizon scandal we saw a pattern that happens over and over where extremely well paid and supposedly high performing executives suddenly remember they were idiots and had no idea about anything so it's not their fault.

I believe we should impose a statutory burden on boards for such outfits to establish that their executives are not idiots, so that when inevitably this happens again the executive is obliged to agree either they are an idiot who couldn't have known they were doing awful things but, they also lied over and over in this mandatory paperwork - and so they go to jail for lying, or, they weren't an idiot after all, they're guilty.

We use this same approach for drink driving here. You can let us take the sample, proving you were hopelessly drunk, then you get banned for drink driving, or, you can refuse the sample, we can't prove you were drunk but you refused and the same penalty applies for refusal.

I'm sure some people will protest - why should I have to put myself at jeopardy, surely I should be allowed to do crimes without consequence? OK, well lets try it out, if every CEO job goes vacant once such a rule comes into effect I guess we'll have discovered every single one of you is a crook, which is good to know. But I suspect instead we'll have no trouble finding candidates and this was simply mispriced - we won't fix the criminality but now those responsible will sometimes end up behind bars at least.