How do those systems and processes make the average persons life better? More red tape + reporting requirements + bureaucracy = ... Profit for the everyday worker and/or everyday consumer?
Criminal activity has a real cost to society. That's why we've decided that certain things should be illegal in the first place. This is a measure that would reduce the number of crimes that are committed by increasing the personal costs for criminal activity (both for the would-be criminal, and for the company's leadership). Because we see criminal activity in corporations today, I would argue that the costs of committing the crime aren't currently high enough.
Taking the VW emissions scandal as an example, there's an estimate that suggests that there will be 1200 premature deaths because of the increased pollution [1]. This has an obvious personal cost to the victims & their families, and there is a larger cost to the overall economy because of the decreased worker output. This doesn't even take into account the growing cost of pollution as a factor in global warming.
Criminal activity CAN have a negative impact on society, but it doesn't always. For that to be true, either every law must be set conservatively (so that things on the edge are clearly negative) or the societal cost of breaking any law, even extremely stupid ones, must be large - large enough to outweigh the advantages of lawbreaking.
Given that most people break the law in minor ways quite often, I'm relatively sure there second is false. And I really wouldn't bet on the first being true either...
We'd all be obviously better off with greater oversight and if CEOs were concerned about their story ending with "and then went to prison". Here's some examples why:
Valve stole from an estimated 20,000 Australians before a judge recognized their former refund policy as being designed to refuse refunds rather than disburse them. Under a system of accountability about 20,000 Australians and maybe several hundred thousand others around the world wouldn't have been stolen from by Valve, who got away with this massive fraud by paying a small fine they contested and changing their refund policy. GOG still enjoys a similarly disingenuous refund policy where you must help them prove the game can open on your computer which is the threshold they invented for denying refunds.
Google realized at some point that they had not coded up a particular kind of refund and let it sit for twenty years, stealing $75 million from their advertising customers persisting long after they knew. Under a system of accountability these companies wouldn't be being stolen from by Google, who got away with this massive fraud by refunding an amount they calculated.
Facebook realized at some point they could steal from children and started both optimizing for more confusing virtual currency purchases and refusing refunds on accounts they identified as children using parents' funds. Under a system of accountability exploiting these children and defrauding their parents wouldn't require a multi-year lawsuit to resolve with a small check.
Then there's the mystery of who's still paying for AOL dialup. Across the internet zombie subscription fraud and free-trial fraud must be in the tens of billions a year, companies optimize around fraud so hard we have to call it dark patterns so they can disassociate from the criminality of what they are doing.
I think the complacency for generalizing corporate bad behavior as opposed to individuals acting within corporations is bad for discourse. These are not abstract entities, and it is wrongful to insinuate teams of bad actors reflect the corporate culture at large. This propels stereotypes and unwarranted distrust.
Presumably laws are intended to benefit society as a whole. I think that's a reasonable (if not grossly simplified) approximation of the purpose of society. And if laws benefit society, fewer companies breaking them will benefit society.
