I'm not saying I think 5MM is the right number; I'm just saying I have no intuition for what the number should be, and the rationale I see on the thread seems to be "they're big". If I get pulled over in a Bentley with an expired sticker, I pay the same price as someone in a Kia.
Perhaps $5mm is a valid fine on top of repaying the illegal profits. But on its own? It is an endorsement.
Depends entirely on where you live. If you do the equivalent crime in Finland, you will be fined 6-14 "day fines". Each day fine is calculated to be (your_monthly_gross_income - 255€)/60, minimum of 6€ and unbound from above.
I believe that this system is much more just than flat fines. A fine is not payment for a service, it is a punishment. It should hurt as much whether you are poor or rich.
That meets an intuitive definition of fairness, but the realpolitik story there is you don't have a lot of power to make trouble for the municipality by tying them up in court for a half-decade arguing how your Bentley was actually operated legally because the definitions of "sticker" and "driving" and "expired" are very flexible (on account of them being not very flexible).
The probability a case heads towards settlement hinges on the ambiguity of the charges and the plaintiff's ability to prove said charges. Securities is way murkier than traffic operation.
Traffic fines are often considered regressive because a rich person can laugh at a few hundred dollars whereas a poor person suddenly can't afford rent.
So yeah, perhaps some fines should scale to ones means, otherwise it won't deter bad behavior.
The fine should scale with the size of the infraction. If you sticker expires on your car, the infraction is the same severity, no matter the car [0]. ~Hiding a few million vs. hiding a few billion in taxes is a whole different level.~ EDIT: They just hid it for information purposes. Not to avoid tax. Therefore, this does not apply in this case.
Also, the fine is intended to discourage the behavior. If the money obtained by breaking the law minus the fee is still positive, there's no incentive to stop breaking the law. $5MM on a fund worth a few billion is very likely to be well within the still profitable area.
[0] I'm not sure about the US, but at least in Germany, an expired sticker actually is a larger infraction for commercial vehicles, especially if you transport people. So even there it's correctly scaling with severity.
As for deterrence: it appears as if the SEC successfully deterred Ensign Peak from doing this, right? They hadn't filed properly since 1997, but the enforcement action is just a couple years old.
>Also, the fine is intended to discourage the behavior. If the money obtained by breaking the law minus the fee is still positive
The money saved not renewing your registration on time is roughly the same regardless of what you're driving so that would seem to favor the fixed fine.
In the US, sure. The people advocating for a proportional fine in the LDS case presumably would argue for a proportional one in your example, too.
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2016/01/24/calculating-sec-c...
