But that argument holds no water at all. Let me try to explain why: In any large organization that has to comply with external standards and regulation there is such a thing as a compliance department. The whole reason this department exists in the first place is to make sure that the products manufacturered by the company and indeed, the company itself and its papertrail all adhere to the law in order to protect the company from liability (number of products sold * maximum fine can be an existential threat even for an entity as large as a car manufacturer). This can be quite an undertaking for a company the size of VW and because it is such an important thing companies this size are super careful to make sure that the people in charge of compliance are not the same people that are in charge of engineering and that the people doing the compliance verification are not the same people that designed the stuff in the first place.