Individual accountability for corporate harms: disqualification and the role of public enforcement

A number of jurisdictions including the UK and Australia use director disqualification as a public enforcement mechanism when responding to corporate harms that give rise to public anger and calls for executive accountability. Focussing on the UK, and referencing the on-going Post Office scandal as an example, this paper demonstrates that disqualification alone is an inadequate means of achieving accountability. This is not just because in the UK it is very rare for directors of large public and private companies to be disqualified. Even were this to change, disqualification would still not achieve retributive and rectificatory goals that-as this paper explores and argues-underpin public calls for individual executive accountability in the wake of corporate scandals. Rather it is aimed at public protection by removing miscreant directors from circulation, and at regulatory goals, that is, at shaping future behaviour through deterrence and standard setting. The literature has focussed on how effectively it achieves these regulatory goals and has overlooked the entirely separate question of whether, as policy makers claim., it adequately achieves accountability. The paper offers suggestions for reform that would address this lacuna, before concluding.