Cowboys and Cowgirls

[WTMHouston]

But that doesn't relieve some criminal from responsibility or punishment that releases fraudulent news and falsified documents.
And doesn't follow SEC regulations for a public company.

As to the first, the best answer is that it depends. Just because a company releases false information (or in some cases information that later proves to be false) does not mean that every person in the company is guilty of a crime or that there has necessarily been fraud -- though there could be. It does not even necessarily mean that the CEO is guilty of a crime, though he could be. For example, though not in the public company context, I just spent four hours finding and beginning the process of fixing errors that we made on some IRS reports from 2002. Had we been a public company, the data that caused the errors could have also resulted in a false public report. On its face, the information we reported was incorrect since it was inconsistent with other information, but after looking into it, it was a clerical error (actually a combination of a misjudgment based on lack of understanding and then a clerical error) rather than intentionally false information. Again, had this been on a larger scale and related to a public company, many would have assumed that it was fraudulent just because it was false -- even though that assumption would have not been anywhere close to the truth.

I guess my point is that we should not be assuming that every release of information that is false makes everyone associated with it a criminal -- though sometimes that will turn out to be the case. It is true enough that there is sometimes activity associated with it that is criminal and when there is, it should usually (though not always) be prosecuted. But, there is generally a fine line between what is simply bad business (or the result of inexperienced business) and what is truly criminal -- even though the results are frequently the same.

As for the violation of SEC regulations, most of those are not, and should not be, crimes. There are thousands (if not tens of thousands) of such transgression every year. Thankfully, not every one of them results in a criminal prosecution.

My point is that most folks these days assume the worst any time there is something that looks suspicious. Our cynicism has conditioned us to expect and assume the worst in people anytime something goes wrong. Sometimes that is a prudent business practice, but sometimes it is just as wrong. Most of the time, it will be more than just a little while before we know for sure.