Prosecutors have to use RICO to charge execs and board members criminally. This is not going to happen, as long as the revolving door (or a sort of collusion between prosecutors and executives) exists.
It’s a partnership. Ultimately the line of people involved in any particular job is extremely short.
Unlike in a tech company where the whole company is building a product, consulting companies are thousands of teams doing projects in a small isolated bubble.
The world needs to adopt some sort of a punitive equivalence principle. Humanity overall has made a lot of progress towards enshrining human rights, but a lack of punitive equivalence is a gaping hole in the right to equality before law. How are two people treated equally if they face different punitive effects for the same act?
What companies use consultants and how? In all my years, I have never seen a consultant or a need for one, so I have a tough time understanding how they make any money, much less a lot of it.
Basically every single large organization inevitably becomes paralyzed by the inability to do anything different from the status quo. When you hear the common complaint that “consultants just tell leadership to do what I was telling them to do for decades” that’s often accurate; because consultants listen to you and have the executive mandate to actually get things done. If you’ve been saying something for ten years and it hasn’t happened, you _need_ a different tool to effect change. Consultants, for better or for worse, are a decent tool for making that happen.
Haven’t you ever wanted research, advice or work done and your coworkers or employees were busy or not quite up to it? White glove consulting is just well-packaged, expensive help.
This line of thinking makes no sense. Why should we care about what their global revenue is? The only thing that matters is how much money they made from opioid consulting. If Amazon did a bad in a small part of their company (eg. they violated labor laws in the state of Washington), why should their punishment be compared to their global revenue?
Because otherwise someone clever could play a shell game where every org does something bad but its split up in such a way to diffuse responsibility across the organization and minimize fines, especially since not all bad things will be caught and fined simultaneously.
>Because otherwise someone clever could play a shell game where every org does something bad but its split up in such a way to diffuse responsibility across the organization and minimize fines,
"We can't figure out who to blame because responsibility is so diffuse, so let's make everyone 100% responsible" makes as much sense as "we can't figure out who the murderers are so let's lock up anyone who vaguely looks like a gangster"[1].
More to the point, it's unclear whether this actually applies in this case. At the very least, you can confine responsibility to the consulting engagements they did with opioid producers. The value McKinsey & Company provides in their management consulting engagements might be questionable, but it's a stretch to claim their engagements with some random fortune 500 (non-pharma) company contributed to the opioid crisis, or need to be punished.
