I share your frustration but any smart CEO will have plausible deniability. Additionally, this is trying to fix it after the fact.
The thing that has stuck in my brain for a while now that the way to solve this issue is with better whistle blower programs. In general, people (usually more than one) in the middle know what they are being asked to do is illegal (or highly questionable, like not disclosing a piece of data about a drug side effect) but fear being fired. Having $10M+ payouts for whistle blowing has the potential to remove that risk. I am making an assumption here that the whistle blower's identity would remain secret, potentially similar to witness protection. So where would the money come from? I think the right answer is the ability of the government to freeze assets (not monthly payroll) and make it so that executives selling stock once the investigation starts would be guilty of insider trading. The details are all solved here but it is meant as a jumping off point.
The biggest challenge would be getting this to pass as most of the companies that are guilty of these things are major candidate backers and pay for tons of lobbying efforts.
The thing that has stuck in my brain for a while now that the way to solve this issue is with better whistle blower programs. In general, people (usually more than one) in the middle know what they are being asked to do is illegal (or highly questionable, like not disclosing a piece of data about a drug side effect) but fear being fired. Having $10M+ payouts for whistle blowing has the potential to remove that risk. I am making an assumption here that the whistle blower's identity would remain secret, potentially similar to witness protection. So where would the money come from? I think the right answer is the ability of the government to freeze assets (not monthly payroll) and make it so that executives selling stock once the investigation starts would be guilty of insider trading. The details are all solved here but it is meant as a jumping off point.
The biggest challenge would be getting this to pass as most of the companies that are guilty of these things are major candidate backers and pay for tons of lobbying efforts.