The parts you quote are the NYT reporting the prosecutor’s allegations as fact. But the passage you quoted also explains everything you need to know about why nobody went to jail.
“The plea agreement, which was technically based on the company’s improper record keeping....”
Wait—so Wal-Mart did all these bad things (they must have, the NYT reported them as fact), but the plea agreement is “technically” based on “improper record keeping?”
If you actually read the facts section of the SEC submission linked from the article, it’s a real snooze fest. There were issues here and there, people were fired, several rounds of compliance programs were instituted, etc. But little to substantiate the prosecution narrative recounted as fact by the NYT. There is a reason Wal-Mart spent a billion dollars investigating this case but the government agreed to settle for less than $300 million—once prosecutors dug in, there wasn’t much of a story there.
I’ll also add:
> As an individual citizen, if I intentionally failed to file my taxes properly, report crimes I knew of, or even fire a housekeeper or other low level employee I knew had been committing crimes that benefited me you can be sure I would be getting more than the equivalent of a parking fine
The IRS’s response to people who intentionally don’t file tax returns—unless the conduct is really outrageous—almost always is to just tell them to file, and pay the deficiency with interest. Except in special circumstances, such as lawyers reporting on other lawyers, ordinary individuals don’t have an obligation to report crimes they’re aware of. Finally, unless it can be argued that you encouraged your housekeeper to commit crimes, or somehow facilitated them, I don’t think there would be anything illegal about not firing him either. Like, you probably can’t criminally prosecute someone for accepting gifts from someone they know is a drug dealer and purchased the gifts with ill-gotten money.
