Why is it difficult to hold individual employees to account for wrongdoing?

Business misbehaviour usually attracts a corporate fine from authorities seeking to punish those responsible and deter future infringements of a similar nature. The corporate fine will punish the firm as a whole and may be most acutely felt by shareholders. Yet corporations (especially large ones) are by their nature rule-following bodies and the decision to commit wrongdoing is typically made by a group of employees (in some cases just one) acting outside the institutional framework of the firm. In the case of cartel infringements of competition law, this involves meeting and communicating in a clandestine manner so as to hide the activity from customers, the authorities and from others within the firm.