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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
A federal judge in Detroit sentenced former engineer James Liang to 40 months in prison on Friday for his role in Volkswagen AG's (VOWG_p.DE) multiyear scheme to sell diesel cars that generated more pollution than U.S. clean air rules allowed.
U.S. District Court Judge Sean Cox also ordered Liang to pay a $200,000 fine, 10 times the amount sought by federal prosecutors. Cox said he hoped the prison sentence and fine would deter other auto industry engineers and executives from similar schemes to deceive regulators and consumers.
Liang was part of a long-term conspiracy that perpetrated a "stunning fraud on the American consumer," Cox said, as the defendant's family looked on in the courtroom. "This is a very serious and troubling crime against our economic system."
Liang pleaded guilty earlier this year to misleading regulators, and had cooperated with U.S. law enforcement officials investigating Volkswagen.
Prosecutors last week recommended that Liang, 63, receive a three-year prison sentence, reflecting credit for his months of cooperation with the U.S. investigation of Volkswagen's diesel emissions fraud. Liang could have received a five-year prison term under federal sentencing guidelines. Liang's lawyers had asked for a sentence of home detention and community service.
Liang can appeal the sentence, Cox said.
Volkswagen pleaded guilty in March to three felony charges under an agreement with prosecutors to resolve the U.S. criminal probe of the company itself. It agreed to spend as much as $25 billion in the United States to resolve claims from owners and regulators and offered to buy back about 500,000 vehicles.
Volkswagen has admitted that it used software to deceive regulators in the United States and Europe from 2006 to 2015.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @01:11AM (7 children)
Putting this guy in jail and not his bosses is neither justice nor a practical deterrent.
The lesson looks like crime pays if you are high enough in the food chain and this guy wasn't.
But might be the Justice department is working on the guys higher and this guy is a step to get there.
We'll have to wait and see what happens next.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday August 28 2017, @01:30AM
They're going to have to prove that the bosses knew of the defeat device.
Sadly, when you have an idiot boss yelling at you to get shit done and quickly, and there's a lot at stake and you can't afford to walk out of your job, all options are on the table. I made the mistake of admitting this during a job interview with Qualcomm. I guess they didn't also like my mention of treating the planners to lunch when they put my stuff at the front of a very busy line.
In my comment above, I didn't perpetrate any of those acts I witnessed except for once -- double-backward wiring in the field. I didn't tell anybody (other than a very trusted teammate who was out with me) and that dirty action threw a good 100K of revenue on the last day of the last week of the last month of the quarter. For the size of the division I was working for at the time, that was pretty goddamn significant, like a game-changing touchdown with seconds left on the clock. I still check up on the status of that system from time to time, and it's still doing well.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @01:51AM (2 children)
> The lesson looks like crime pays if you are high enough in the food chain and this guy wasn't.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/25/business/volkswagen-engineer-prison-diesel-cheating.html?mcubz=0 [nytimes.com]
If this quote from NY Times is correct, it seems to me that Liang was fairly high up the food chain...!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @04:14AM (1 child)
He was: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-25/vw-engineer-sentenced-to-40-months-for-emissions-cheating-role [bloomberg.com]
He's not some ordinary engineer thrown as sacrificial lamb to the wolves, not knowing what happened...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @12:49PM
"But the judge said Mr. Liang was “too loyal” to the German automaker he had worked for since the 1980s, and unwilling to expose its deceptive practices or walk away from his $350,000-a-year job."
He's not very high up in the food chain at that salary.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @05:11AM
The lesson is: Don't lie to the US government, even if your boss tells you to. Instead, you should blow the whistle and under the False Claims Act, receive a nice chunk of the fine.
(Score: 3, Informative) by MostCynical on Monday August 28 2017, @08:00AM
"This guy" was the most senior VW engineer in the US.
He is not a "worker bee",
I suspect he is the most senior VW employee in the US who is also a US resident.
Most of the more senior people are likely to be German citizens, and likely far harder to charge.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Monday August 28 2017, @04:01PM
No--this is a good deterrent.
If the little people, or engineers like myself, see things like this -- despite the promises of wealth, and assurances that the company will be there to protect you, if you just did this thing that the executives want ...
Then this stuff would happen far less often. The executives aren't the ones writing the software and making it happen. They're the ones asking for it.
Throw enough existing legal precedent at someone who thinks he can get a large bonus for doing the wrong thing, and get away with it, may get him to think twice.
We already know that doing the right thing is its own reward based on that other study, right, and sometimes the wrong thing comes with a lot more incentive. Instituting punishments on people opting to do the wrong thing can prevent a lot of wrong things despite any implied incentive.
If the engineers are going to be out of a job, or are threatened with such -- I can't help you there. It is easy to say to quit and work somewhere else, so I won't say that, because the real scenarios are complicated. I can say, though, that freedom of joblessless is better than prison sentences. Maybe with enough time, the execs can get punished, too, to keep them from making these types of demands.
But the demands will always come, in one form of mandate or another, be it impossible sales targets (wells fargo) or cheating on emissions, or just outright dishonesty from top to bottom.
Regulations can get in the way, but not this time. They asked for what couldn't be done, designed and promoted and provided incentive to create a cheat to make it look like they had, and lied to the public about what they were selling. Everyone involved should get punished, and the entire chain for this sort of behavior is greatly weakened if the incentives to cheat are diminished.
If anything, I'd want to see more people in charge of making the decisions to defraud the public to end up sharing the same cells with their underlings that were able to make it happen.