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In Corporate Crimes, Individual Accountability Is Elusive

February 20, 2015

In Corporate Crimes, Individual Accountability Is Elusive

“We have never hesitated to investigate and prosecute any individual, institution or organization that attempted to exploit our markets and take advantage of the American people,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. proclaimed this month when the Justice Department announced that Standard & Poor’s, the ratings agency, had agreed to pay $1.375 billion to settle civil charges that it inflated ratings on mortgage-backed securities at the heart of the financial crisis.

And this week, he pledged a renewed effort to bring cases against individuals responsible for financial fraud, calling on federal prosecutorsto “try to develop cases against individuals and to report back in 90 days.”

Forgive me if I don’t hold my breath.

 

Yes, plenty of people have been prosecuted for mortgage fraud and other financial crimes since the financial crisis: The Justice Department has charged over 4,000 people with mortgage fraud alone, according to a spokesman. And the department has filed 46,000 white-collar crime cases since 2009.

Yet almost all of these are low-level employees with little or no name recognition. Hardly any top executives at the financial firms paying multimillion- and billion-dollar-plus fines for engaging in criminal behavior have been charged or convicted. (One exception is Lee B. Farkas, former chairman of the mortgage firm Taylor, Bean & Whitaker, who isserving a 30-year prison term.)

 

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