The diesel scandal of Volkswagen has made a huge mess for the company. With over 685,000 vehicles affected in the US with the defeat device installed for the emissions systems, Volkswagen vehicles have been emitting as much as forty times the allowable pollutants into the atmosphere for several years. This not only has caused Volkswagen to lose sales and be under strict scrutiny, but it caused the EPA to be embarrassed about their testing procedures. Even though there’s a settlement in place shouldn’t some of the parties involved and the company as a whole be charged with some form of criminal activity?

There are several challenges to dealing with this mess in a criminal manner. First of all, the US Justice Department would have to determine exactly what they need to charge the company with. There are already civil law suits pending and taking the charges farther to a criminal court will only cause more delays and much higher costs. Secondly, if the Justice Department were to choose to charge individual Volkswagen employees in criminal court they would have to extradite them from Germany in order to move forward with the proceedings.

These are actually the easiest parts of the challenge for the Justice Department. Currently there is a settlement in place which is an agreement to pay as much as $15.3 billion for this cheating scandal. There is $10 billion put aside for the customers whose vehicles need to be bought back and there’s additional money that is for other purposes. Part of the money, $2.7 billion which will be paid over three years, is to allow for the replacement of busses or to fund the infrastructure needed to reduce diesel emissions. An additional $2 billion, which will be spent over the next ten years, will help fund programs to promote the construction of EV chargers and help to develop zero emissions ride sharing fleets.

The goal with this settlement is to help seriously reduce the damaged to the atmosphere caused by these Volkswagen models, but the question still remains as to whether or not Volkswagen should face criminal charges. It appears there was no clause in the settlement agreement that would protect the company against criminal charges or the individual members of the leadership of Volkswagen that were directly involved in this scandal. The problem is, Volkswagen may choose to pull out of the US altogether if specific charges, such as criminal ones, are levied against the company.

Many of the board members who were involved in creating this scandal have since been released by Volkswagen, which may be punishment enough. Not only are they out of job, but their reputations have been tarnished with the news of their direct involvement in this scandal and what the results have been. It seems adding criminal charges on top of what’s already in place would only serve the lawyers interests, who could rack up even loftier bills that would eventually need to be paid. In my opinion, this scandal needs to be able to be resolved sooner rather than later and should not continue any farther.