Yet, the fine for running a red light is not proportional to a persons earnings (in the us).

It’s like parking in places that could lead to a ticket. If you only get a ticket once every 100 times you park. It might be cheaper and more convenient to park illegally.

The system has to up enforcement or up the pain of non compliance. Else you encourage people to take the rational choice of breaking the rules.

> When you ignore a red light, the fine is not calculated based on whether you had an accident or not. For a fine to be significant, it has to exceed the profit made from the crime, otherwise you'll keep running red lights until you actually crash or run someone over.

Sure but that would still be based on the profits of the scheme, not any other unrelated revenue. In your traffic light analogy it’d be like billing the ticket based upon how many miles per year you drive rather than the speed limit or how fast you were going.

I can't remember which, but there are countries where traffic fines are scaled to your income, which would be a great way to fine companies.

If we're giving them the rights of people, then just fine them by time with the same effect as if they were a person.

Median wage is $12/hr and a company with $50bn/yr revenue does something that would normally be $120? $250 million.

Finland is most often given as an example of this.

> For a fine to be significant, it has to exceed the profit made from the crime

I think their point is that we don't know how much profit Intuit made from the crime (at least, I couldn't find it in the article). The assumption is that tricking people into paying to file when they didn't have to is not 100% of their revenue.

That was understood. The point is that the fine is punitive and should be a large portion of their revenue to make it clear that bad behavior is the opposite of profitable and continued bad behavior may lead to bankruptcy.