What do you think an appropriate penalty is? When I first read this headline I was worried the fine would be just a slap on the wrist. I was glad to see it was more substantial.

Personally, I think a fine like this is just if it causes consulting firms to think about the consequences of their actions and do the right thing in the future. Making firms responsible for damages they cause would be best. Making it it clearly unprofitable is a good step.

For basic fraud/bad behavior, off the top of my head, at least 5-6x what they made from it might be good. Anything involving direct, long term physical harm (such as death) needs a secondary penalty on top of this unrelated to profits made.

You have to account for not all of these schemes being uncovered. Then you have to add an actual penalty on top of it.

Generally, for just plain old fraud or similar, this gets close to it for me. In this particular case however, where the wrong doing resulted in many deaths I think some other approach is appropriate.

I would really like to see more argument over why jail time is not an appropriate response for senior leaders within organisations that currently suffer nothing more than a fine. Where an organisation has shareholders if the fine is really big then the persons perceived as responsible will, presumably/hopefully, see their career prospects suffer but really to provide an incentive where the benefits can be supremely high I think seeing a few of your peers spending time in jug would help. I appreciate the problem is knowing who to jail and I appreciate that's a hard problem and I don't have a ready answer for it.

This is closer to 600x what they would have made on a study like this.