if a person fucks up, massive consequences. A company? I'm pretty sure the CEO and board got plenty of cash, and lots of protections against all their wrongdoings
That's not necessarily true. The vast majority of individual people that file chapter 7 don't give up a penny. US bankruptcy law is surprisingly progressive for the little guy -- even compared to other progressive countries.
You but we aren't discussing bankruptcy. If you call the police and give them false information to get someone else arrested. I'll bet that when they find out, you'll be the one getting arrested. These CEOs and board members don't even get fined personally, the company usually pays
There is no claim that a CEO or board member made any false statements to police in this story. Furthermore, no matter who at Hertz called it in, the crime of "making false statements" generally requires that the statements be knowingly and willfully wrong.
If Hertz reports a car stolen because front desk staff made a mistake, that's simply not criminal. This also applies to you as an individual too. If you report your car stolen when you forgot where you parked it, that is also not criminal. Hertz is being treated the same as you would be.
I don't see anything in this story that describes a crime. (except for the people who may have actually stolen cars) These are descriptions of civil wrongdoings.
You're completely ignoring the point of the comment that you're responding to. Someone at Hertz is culpable for not taking steps to prevent this from happening.
> Someone at Hertz is culpable for not taking steps to prevent this from happening.
Of course, this is what the 191 lawsuits are about. They are to determine Hertz's culpability in -- with what the article describes -- are the civil wrongdoings I mentioned in my above comment.
Organizations are good at diffusing responsibility. Even when crime is egregious, like the pfas leak, and would be enough to sentence everyone in the organization to life in prison, justice can't find anyone who is directly liable, so nobody is punished.
> Someone at Hertz is culpable for not taking steps to prevent this from happening.
It's far from clear that anybody at Hertz is criminally culpable, which is what was suggested upthread, with talk of people making false statements being arrested.
I think, that to suggest that people should be held criminally responsible for the mistakes of others (assuming that these are mistakes), is a pretty extreme position. Over-criminalization of everything a much more problematic situation that had led to larger problems with mass incarceration that underlies many of the most significant problems that the US has.
The solution to everything isn't "lock 'em up and throw away the key". We have functional civil courts, and they are more than capable of remediating wrongs.
No. They should be held responsible for their own mistakes. I'm not sure who else but the CEO and board you think have the ability and responsibility to make sure their company is acting appropriately.
> We have functional civil courts, and they are more than capable of remediating wrongs
Perhaps for the first, or second, or tenth instance - but surely at some point, if certain senior people at Hertz know, or ought to know, that their system has a track record of making incorrect accusations, and they continue to use it anyway, it must rise to at least a standard of wilful indifference to whether or not the statements are correct.
It doesn't work like that. It's not graded on a percentage scale, it's pass/fail.
"Knowingly" and "willfully" have legally significant meanings with their own standards of the mental state that qualifies. It is then up to the court to determine whether or not your actions have met those conditions.
I think you are correct on this, this is indeed a civil matter, it's called voluntary parting, in other cases that made it to this site where people have tried to report to the police that the camera they rented out or something was never returned were told it's not theft. I think what happens is that they report the vehicles to the police as stolen, as they would if they found a car missing from the lot, instead of telling them someone did not return it.
I don't disagree. Let me slightly backtrack on my previous statement: I think some states explicitly spell out penalties for failure to return a rental car, while in others, it may be up to the specific circumstances to determine whether a crime has taken place or whether it is a civil disagreement or misunderstanding on terms, etc.
If they make a pattern of it they're likely to get smacked with punitive damages or a similarly large class action, see McDonalds coffee for a good example. If you write off the punitive damages as a cost of doing business the judgements are going to go up exponentially from there (assuming the next claimant's lawyer is smart enough to find and read the last judgement).
I think if you make one individual accountable for every mistake a company makes, then you change the nature of business. In this case, you want the CEO and board to go to prison because some low-level employee made a mistake on some paperwork. That could be avoided; simply don't report car thefts to the police. Charge people $20,000 up front to rent a $20,000 car, and say "if you return it and we feel like it, we'll give you $19,000" back. If the car gets stolen, not their problem anymore. If they mis-file some paperwork and don't give you $19,000 when you return it, well the contract you signed said "if we feel like it" and they didn't feel like it, so I guess keep the car if you want to. But, this business model would never work, so there simply wouldn't be car rental companies anymore.
There has to be some abstraction layer between a company and its officers, or companies can't take the risk of delegating anything to employees. The reality of society is that sometimes something is going to get fucked up, and the dispute resolution process is expensive and messy. That's the legal system, and it exists for a reason. Ideally, most people don't have to use it very often, and the 0.001% of the time when something fails catastrophically, the pain of that one individual that it didn't work for makes society less painful for everyone else longer term. This person lost their real estate license, so that thousands of other people can drive someone else's car while they're on vacation without having to buy the car with cash outright. Net win? Probably.
To some extent, you can always reduce the risk of anything to as low as you want. It's just that at some point, the cost of that makes the entire endeavor not worthwhile financially. Risk aversion is a tax on innovation, so you don't want to become too risk averse. I think society has found a decent balance here.
I get where you are coming from, but I had a job a few years ago where this type of incident would be pretty devastating.
Some people’s employers would be aware of a pending arrest warrant within hours, likely before they are. People get immediately suspended without pay and need to hire an attorney, etc to figure out wtf is going on. Depending on what happened, it could take months to restore everything.
I manage risk for a living. If a consumer needs to be worried about felony arrest when renting a fricking car, something is very wrong. I would assert that if the company’s incompetence in implementing, administrating, and signing off on controls is such that customers are being arrested because they can’t figure out wth their rental cars are, the executives should have Sarbanes-Oxley exposure and potential criminal liability.
> If a consumer needs to be worried about felony arrest when renting a fricking car, something is very wrong.
Indeed, but it is not surprising. Despite all copaganda, police has always never been "your friend", but the armed enforcers of capitalism.
When a company files a police report, police are not going to question it. They will bash your door in, shoot your dog and/or yourself and/or your neighbors, ask questions later, and only pay for damages when ordered to do so by a lengthy court process.
And no, I'm not just polemic here, this is reality. There have been countless house "search and seizure" operations on people who had committed the "crime" of having their wifi hotspot unsecured, who have downloaded stuff from university libraries (R.I.P. Aaron Swartz), for running TOR exit nodes, or for exposing government or corporate "secrets" that caused scandals.
They only care about capital, they care about maximizing their KPIs (which tend to have far more to do with protecting the state and/or generating revenue) and getting paid. Their KPIs only reflect protecting capital as much as trickles down from the elected executives who are ultimately at the top of the accountability (or lack thereof) pyramid.
If enforcement cared directly about capital dangers to the public and crimes of possession would be taken a lot less seriously than they are and property crimes would be taken a lot more seriously.
> In this case, you want the CEO and board to go to prison because some low-level employee made a mistake on some paperwork.
Yes. If the CEO and board want the responsibility of owning a company then yes they should also own-up to fuck-ups by their employees.
If big companies don't want to be responsible for thousands of employees then perhaps it's time to split up the responsibilities -- and the compensations too.
Right? Isn't that the excuse for paying them 1000x what their employees make (while going through bankruptcy no less)? They're the ones with the responsibility and personal risk?
Maybe let's try rephrasing it. Knowingly making a false report to the police is a crime. If it happens once or twice or even a few times over several years, that's not such a big deal, mistakes happen.
But in this case, it seems like there are several hundred false reports over several years. It's so much, that Hertz was able to hand over a database of data related to it. This is negligence, they clearly know they are doing something wrong and they know it's harming other people.
If tens or hundreds of your employees are making false reports consistently over many years and you're not doing something to resolve it? I suppose the answer to your question is yes.
Knowing the your employees are making mistakes is not the same as knowingly making a false statement. And making statements that are found to be untrue is also not the same as making a false statement.
For it to be a crime, a single person must willingly make a statement that they know is false. Making a statement and being incorrect about it is not criminal. Knowing that other people have made incorrect statements is not criminal.
That being said, making mistakes that harms other people is a civil tort. And that’s why these cases are going to a judge now as mentioned in the article. It also worth noting that the article is about allegedly untrue reports of car theft. Whether or not those claims are accurate still remains to be tested in court.
> You want a CEO to go to jail if an employee decides to do their job wrong?
If a single employee's actions can cause an innocent person to be arrested, the company procedures were clearly inadequate - in this case, a lack of a "four eyes" principle at car checkin/checkout and insufficient record-keeping and quality assurance of these records.
It is the job of the employees to do their tasks correctly... and the job of management to provide the necessary resources for employees to do their tasks and to implement procedures to catch and prevent (inevitable) human or machine error.
Mark Fields (the CEO) could put in a process to make it difficult or impossible to accidentally get your customers arrested, but he doesn't give a shit if that happens right now
The idea is that Mark would feel some sort of inconvenience if something was screwed up this badly, ideally, in light of the fact that he's receiving $16,000,000/year
> This person lost their real estate license, so that thousands of other people can drive someone else's car while they're on vacation without having to buy the car with cash outright. Net win? Probably.
"Thank you for your patriotic sacrifice, comrade customer."
>"This person lost their real estate license, so that thousands of other people can drive someone else's car while they're on vacation without having to buy the car with cash outright. Net win? Probably."
If said person get immediately compensated to full extent and a lot more on top. If any record of being criminally charged and any trace of arrest / interaction with police in regards to criminal matter gets wiped out. Then maybe.
Otherwise fuck those vacationers. They're free to go and buy car or vote for the system that does not jail people for hint of offence.
> This person lost their real estate license, so that thousands of other people can drive someone else's car while they're on vacation without having to buy the car with cash outright. Net win? Probably.
if a person fucks up, massive consequences. A company? I'm pretty sure the CEO and board got plenty of cash, and lots of protections against all their wrongdoings