Because otherwise someone clever could play a shell game where every org does something bad but its split up in such a way to diffuse responsibility across the organization and minimize fines, especially since not all bad things will be caught and fined simultaneously.
>Because otherwise someone clever could play a shell game where every org does something bad but its split up in such a way to diffuse responsibility across the organization and minimize fines,
"We can't figure out who to blame because responsibility is so diffuse, so let's make everyone 100% responsible" makes as much sense as "we can't figure out who the murderers are so let's lock up anyone who vaguely looks like a gangster"[1].
More to the point, it's unclear whether this actually applies in this case. At the very least, you can confine responsibility to the consulting engagements they did with opioid producers. The value McKinsey & Company provides in their management consulting engagements might be questionable, but it's a stretch to claim their engagements with some random fortune 500 (non-pharma) company contributed to the opioid crisis, or need to be punished.
