Corporate arrogance for the day

Bill Vlasic has an article in The New York Times about GM:

The consequences of General Motors’ long-delayed recall of defective small cars hit a grim milestone recently, when the company’s compensation fund said it had approved the hundredth death claim tied to faulty ignition switches (photo).
The toll far exceeds the thirteen victims that GM had said last year were the only known fatalities linked to ignitions that could suddenly cut off engine power and disable airbags.
And as the number of victims mounts, the ignition-switch crisis is cementing its status as one of the deadliest automotive safety issues in American history.
The number of fatalities will most likely ultimately fall short of the estimated three hundred people killed in Ford Explorers equipped with Firestone tires in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
But while the Ford-Firestone accidents were obvious incidents of tire failures and sport utility vehicle rollovers, the ignition switch has gained notoriety because the defect was essentially hidden for a decade until GM began recalling nearly three million affected cars last year.
Lawyers involved in litigation against GM have accused the company of deliberately understating the magnitude of switch-related deaths in congressional hearings last year.
“The success of the cover-up for over a decade leaves most of the victims unaccounted for,” said Robert Hilliard, one of the lead lawyers in a consolidated group of lawsuits against GM. “One hundred is not even the tip of the iceberg.”
A GM spokesman said recently that the company cited thirteen deaths for so long because it based those fatalities on extensive accident reconstruction efforts.
Kenneth Feinberg, an independent compensation expert hired by GM, has made settlement offers to the families of people who died in the vehicles with faulty ignitions.
“The Feinberg facility is a settlement program,” said Jim Cain, the GM spokesman. “It is designed to settle claims, rather than make rigorous engineering or legal judgments about the definitive causes of the accidents.”
In the fund’s regular weekly update released on Monday, Feinberg said that more than four thousand claims for deaths and injuries had been filed.
Of that total, the fund has so far approved payments for a hundred deaths and nearly two hundred injuries. There are still 37 death claims and 589 injury claims that are under review, the fund said.
Camille Biros, the deputy manager of the program, said that many of the eligible death claims involve younger victims in their teens and early twenties. She said the fatalities involved passengers as well as drivers, including people sitting in the back seat of vehicles.
Some of the claims were made for accidents that occurred after GM began recalling the small cars in February. But Biros said there was no precise number available for post-recall victims.
GM set up the compensation fund last year after its internal investigation showed that dozens of engineers, lawyers and investigators inside the company had known about ignition problems for years but failed to fix them.
Mary T. Barra, GM’s chief executive, dismissed fifteen employees as a result of the internal inquiry, overhauled the automaker’s vast engineering operations and changed its safety protocols.
GM paid a $35 million fine to Federal regulators for failing to report the defect in a timely manner. And the company is still under investigation by the Justice Department for possible criminal charges and civil penalties.
The switch crisis led to dozens of other recalls last year by GM, the nation’s largest automaker, for a wide range of vehicle defects. The company has spent about $3 billion over all on the recalls, including setting aside six hundred million dollars to compensate ignition-switch victims.
Biros of the compensation fund said it hoped to complete its review of all claims by July of 2015. She also stressed, as did GM, that Feinberg’s standard for reviewing claims was more lenient than those used by the company or a court to determine whether the defect caused an accident. “Ours is not a legal nor is it an engineering review of these claims,” she said.

Rico says that people should be publicly whipped, preferably on national television, for this... (Mere dismissal is way too lenient.)