Monday, July 02, 2012

Dog-training the Corporation

The largest health care fraud case in history was settled today for $3 billion.

As I noted in an earlier post, entitled Cheese and Choke Chains, changing corporate behavior is all about incentivizing the right good actors, and penalizing the right bad actor.  Or, as I told a reporter earlier today:

The bad news is that monetary penalties are not enough to stop rampant fraud... If we want to stop fraud, we need to recover America's stolen billions and we need to make sure that key players lose their jobs, their bank accounts, and their freedom... Once the pain is personal and well-timed, the change in conduct in fraudster-companies will be very rapid.



You know what doesn't work?


What doesn't work is levying a penalty 10 years too late, and levying the penalty on the stock holders who did not do the fraud, while letting everyone in the company who planned the fraud, and winked at the fraud while it was going on, keep their jobs, their promotions, their bonuses, their stock options, and their beach houses. 

For those who care (both of you), I should have a very short clip on the CBS morning show tomorrow, as well as a quote or two in The New York Times and on CBS radio.  English language Al Jazeera did a live studio feed and a side-walk feed (oh yes, you know I looked great).
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2 comments:

PBurns said...

Woops! -- I was deleting posts I never posted (scraps of ideas) and I accidently deleted this entire post. I found it in the email bin, but lost the comment from RICK who wrote:
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Stop it! It's bad enough that corporations have been equated with humans by the Supreme Court. Now you're putting them in the same boat with dogs. Don't insult dogs like that! (chuckle)

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PBurns said...

Be sure to spay and neuter your corporate CEO!