Need help responding to this to by offering own perspectives on whether the CEOs and other corporate officers involved were justly held criminally responsible or not.

The Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme is one of the largest white-collar crimes in history. Bernard Lawrence "Bernie" Madoff was an American financier who defraud investors out of billions of dollars. The scheme would payoff early investors with money from later investors. Madoff was able maintain the scheme for decades because of his front of respectability. Madoff started his own market-maker firm and helped launched the Nasdaq stock market. He was an industry veteran, not many people doubted him. Madoff's sons turned him in after he confessed to them. Madoff was not the only one who was punished. "In 2009, Madoff's accountant and lawyer David G. Friehling faced a maximum sentence of 114 years in prison but was later fined and sentenced to one year of house arrest and an additional year of a supervised release instead" (Yang and Kay, 2021). In 2014, five employees were also found guilty even though Madoff claims to have done it alone.

I believed those who were responsible were punished accordingly. "Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison and forced to forfeit $170 billion in 2009. His three homes and four boats were auctioned off by the U.S. Marshals (Hayes, 2022)."

Businesses are run by people. People can get greedy and make mistakes. It can be hard to make ethical decisions. Having government oversight is not perfect but it's necessary to help protect the public. Businesses cannot always be trusted to do what was right as we can see from pass cases; Enron and WorldCom are two examples of why.