To counteract the opposite incentive - "we learned there's a terrible side effect of what we're doing, the obvious choice is to bury that info and cover it up" by making you liable once others catch on.

> To counteract the opposite incentive - "we learned there's a terrible side effect of what we're doing, the obvious choice is to bury that info and cover it up" by making you liable once others catch on.

Doesn't the presence of legal penalties for an action make it even more desirable (for the perpetrator, from a purely practical point of view) to bury information about those actions and cover them up?