Fines written off as business expenses let corporations profit from wrongdoing

Evidence

Transgressing corporations shield their upper-echelon executives from accountability for their harmful practices and pay fines without having to admit wrongdoing. They receive taxpayer bailouts for financial losses and turn financial penalties into tax benefits by writing off fines as business expenses. They do so with the tacit consent of lawmakers who depend heavily on corporate funding of their political campaigns. This set of exonerations makes it easy to strip morality from harmful practices. With faulty corporate practices disconnected from adverse consequences for wrongdoers, the free-market system loses its corrective influence. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1608

Categorization

• CANDY: ‘They pay fines as business expenses’ is a one-line, conversation-ready scandal about how corporate crime is subsidized by taxpayers.
• SEED: Essay angle: the perverse loop where fines function as a licensing fee for crime, with the tax deduction as the discount coupon. Could pair with the calibration discussion from earlier in this book.
• XREF: connects to: Fines function as a negligible cost of doing business for large polluters — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 69