Just as hiring someone to kill for you does not absolve you of the legal responsibility for murder, hiring someone to lie for you does not absolve you of the legal responsibility for fraud.
1) Disney decided to outsource a project (a program? entire department?) to Cognizant.
2) Cognizant brought their own staffers onto the project, those staffers were brought into the US on an H1 program.
3) Disney included mandatory training of Cognizant employees into severance package of their departing employees.
Neither (1), (2) or (3) are illegal by themselves.
The outcome of 1+2+3 suggests there might have been fraud happening at stage 2, where Cognizant had to prove to US Department of Labor that they could not find an appropriate US resident to take the job and that they were paying the prevailing rate.
Considering Cognizant received an approval on H1 visas, they must've indeed advertised for the job paying prevailing wage and found no one. The loophole seemed to allow them to advertise for an opening in the city they're incorporated (Teaneck, NJ) for prevailing wage in Teaneck, NJ, which might (or might not) be the prevailing wage in Burbank, CA or Anaheim, CA.
What do you expect the court to do in this scenario? Forbid Disney (and related companies) from outsourcing anything in the future? Forbid New Jersey contractors from winning contracts in California and bringing their consultants on-site? Forbid Disney (and companies in similar situation) from including mandatory training into severance packages? Mandate H1 employees are bound not only to the employer in question but specific geographic location they were hired for, so a New Jersey employee is forbidden from working on a project in a different state?
Each one of those decisions has some unintended consequences when you look at the larger picture than Disney+Cognizant.
But that doesn't need to be done by the government. It seems like the sort of situation that a good collective bargaining agreement could handle. Such an oddity might guarantee a minimum severance package that is not contingent upon the employees symbolically cutting their own throats.
I believe that immigration law already requires an LCA to be filed for each non-temporary work location. If Cognizant intended to employ workers in California longer than 10 days, it would have to pay the prevailing California wage, not the prevailing New Jersey wage.
H1B workers already are "bound" to the area of the LCA. If the company wants to move them permanently, it has to file another LCA for them.
None of those requirements prevented this from happening.
Disney had a duty, which could not reasonably be delegated, to ensure that its contractor would be obeying the laws that Disney is expected to obey. If such a duty did not exist, there would be a huge, obvious loophole in the law that would allow anyone to break any law at will, just by creating a throwaway corporation to do it, and paying the skeleton crew a scapegoat bonus.
