More generally, people have prejudices about what crime "looks like", which isn't an office, and there is a huge pro-business bias generally in the West based on the idea of "creating jobs".
I don't think that's a good answer; in general governments get even more latitude to screw up than businesses do.
I think it's just that groups with diffused responsibility get more latitude, because for a given act, who are you going to put in jail exactly? That turns out to be a hard question, especially when you consider not just the local consequences but the global ones. For instance, take a hard line "I'm putting the CEO/Secretary of X/Whatever the highest plausible person is in jail" stance and you just created an extraordinary incentive for pervasive, total micromanagement, and probably in the end worse results for society than even what we have now. It's a hard problem.
Interesting that you say "screw up", which implies error rather than malice. Maybe that's an important part of it that we look at intent of individuals and then label them "bad", whereas the intent of a business decision is harder to label?
I intend screw up here to represent both innocent error and deliberate malice. Teasing apart which is which in groups is hard, especially since it may well be both at the same time with different people in various roles.
More generally, people have prejudices about what crime "looks like", which isn't an office, and there is a huge pro-business bias generally in the West based on the idea of "creating jobs".