Corporations are not sentient entities. They are contracts. They do not "do" things. They do not make decisions. Executives do.
When corporate activity breaks a law or harms people, it means the executives decided to do that.
When a corporation has been fined for something, what you are witnessing is the executives being let off the hook for what they did. Perhaps the prosecutor/regulator wants to keep get big money from corporations after leaving government.
@dcjohnson you need to go farther, though: often enough executives don't do things either, leaving the actual work to employees below them.
And sorting that sort of thing out is why we have corporate structures in the first place and start, from the beginning, as treating corporate activity as if the corporation did do the thing.
So, we hold the corporation accountable, which provides the incentive for the responsible parties to be held responsible by their owners who lost out.
It's the opposite of letting an executive off the hook. It's incentivizing ongoing policing first hold them responsible and make sure it doesn't happen again.
Sometimes government policy is in place because it's simply a good idea.
