The premise that the author would've landed in jail for implementing the backdating scheme is flawed. His CFO went to jail, but because in the process of choosing favorable dates for backdating her stock options, she ended up deliberately misstating her income for certain years on her tax returns.
By and large, people do not go to jail for simply picking the wrong plausible interpretation of tax or accounting law. There's even a Supreme Court case about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheek_v._United_States ("The Court held that an actual good-faith belief that one is not violating the tax law, based on a misunderstanding caused by the complexity of the tax law, negates willfulness, even if that belief is irrational or unreasonable.")
With something like backdating, you're essentially going around saying that something happened on one date (the options grant), when it actually happened on some other date. While that may be kosher for the purposes of accounting, and PWC or E&Y will happily sign off on that, it doesn't mean that those assertions are thus okay in any other context. And that's not a subtle legal gotcha, it should be plainly obvious.
By and large, people do not go to jail for simply picking the wrong plausible interpretation of tax or accounting law. There's even a Supreme Court case about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheek_v._United_States ("The Court held that an actual good-faith belief that one is not violating the tax law, based on a misunderstanding caused by the complexity of the tax law, negates willfulness, even if that belief is irrational or unreasonable.")
With something like backdating, you're essentially going around saying that something happened on one date (the options grant), when it actually happened on some other date. While that may be kosher for the purposes of accounting, and PWC or E&Y will happily sign off on that, it doesn't mean that those assertions are thus okay in any other context. And that's not a subtle legal gotcha, it should be plainly obvious.