By Matthew
Richardson
The much discussed “Yates
Memo” seems to signal that DOJ will now follow the long-anticipated
realignment of prosecutions to target individual bad actors over more numerous
or more high-profile institutions. This goes to an essentially unanswerable question
interested readers might ask themselves: if you want to prevent corporate
wrongdoing, what’s more effective, putting fear into actual executives that
they might be prosecuted, or hitting the institution with a big enough
financial penalty for it to really sting? Put another way, what gets a bigger
reaction, taking heads or taking dollars? Reasonable people will disagree, but
going forward, perhaps DOJ’s experiment will provide interested parties with
some research to consider.
