3 ms·

"Knowing" and "willful" can be a bit confusing. Generally in statutes you do something "knowingly" if you have knowledge of it. If you know the report is false

by tzs 2y ago

"Knowing" and "willful" can be a bit confusing. Generally in statutes you do something "knowingly" if you have knowledge of it. If you know the report is false when you sign it you have "knowingly" signed off on a false report. "Willful" means that you knew that you were doing something that the law forbids. If you knew the reports was false but did not know that the law forbids doing that then it would not be willful. Here's a more detailed explanation from the DoJ [1]. That's in general rather than specifically about Sarbanes-Oxley but a quick grep in SOX didn't turn up any SOX-specific definitions for those terms. [1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual-910-knowingly-and-willfully https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...

jgeada 2y ago
I've always found those distinctions in legal code to have the (possibly deliberate) side effect of encouraging deliberate ignorance. It is not wilful or knowing if they make no effort to know or understand what the implications of their decisions were. I strongly believe this to be a wrong approach that does nothing to change MBA approach to decision making: It is all about a buck now and the less they know about consequences later the better (for them personally, not for the rest of us)
- pdabbadabba 2y ago
  The law tries to address this. If a defendant is aware that there is a significant risk of [X], but deliberately avoided information that might confirm [X], then knowledge that [X] can often be imported to them under the "willful blindness" doctrine. Though, as you can imagine, it can be difficult to apply this in practice since it is difficult to articulate the level of suspicion a defendant must have had in order to have been "willfully blind" rather than just ignorant. https://scholarship.law.uci.edu/faculty_scholarship/803/ https://scholarship.law.uci.edu/faculty_scholarship/803/

by tzs 2y ago

jgeada 2y ago

I've always found those distinctions in legal code to have the (possibly deliberate) side effect of encouraging deliberate ignorance. It is not wilful or knowing if they make no effort to know or understand what the implications of their decisions were. I strongly believe this to be a wrong approach that does nothing to change MBA approach to decision making: It is all about a buck now and the less they know about consequences later the better (for them personally, not for the rest of us)

pdabbadabba 2y ago
The law tries to address this. If a defendant is aware that there is a significant risk of [X], but deliberately avoided information that might confirm [X], then knowledge that [X] can often be imported to them under the "willful blindness" doctrine. Though, as you can imagine, it can be difficult to apply this in practice since it is difficult to articulate the level of suspicion a defendant must have had in order to have been "willfully blind" rather than just ignorant. https://scholarship.law.uci.edu/faculty_scholarship/803/ https://scholarship.law.uci.edu/faculty_scholarship/803/