The US Justice Department has drawn up new guidelines that emphasize prosecuting individual executives in corporate crime cases, and not just their companies.

The new rules came in response to the criticism that the Obama administration had not vigorously pursued individuals in the financial meltdown and housing crisis of 2008-2009 and in various corporate scandals.

Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, author of a memo outlining the rules for federal prosecutors, announced the guidelines in a speech on Thursday at the New York University Law School.

“Crime is crime and it is our obligation at the Justice Department to ensure that we are holding lawbreakers accountable regardless of whether they commit their crimes on the street corner or in the board room. In the white-collar context, that means pursuing not just corporate entities but also the individuals through which these corporations act," Yates said.

By going after individuals, Yates said the Justice Department wanted to "change corporate culture to appropriately recognize the full costs of wrongdoing, rather than treating liability as a cost of doing business."

Yates declared, “Companies would not get credit for cooperating with investigators unless they identify all employees responsible for crimes - regardless of executive rank or seniority - and turn over all evidence against them.”

“The Justice Department would not allow companies to foist the blame onto low-level officials,” she added.

“We’re not going to be accepting a company’s cooperation when they just offer up the vice president in charge of going to jail,” she said.

Yates, in remarks to the NYU law school, said, “Our job is to seek accountability from those who break our laws and victimize our citizens.  It’s the only way to truly deter corporate wrongdoing.’’

For the Justice Department, corporate prosecutions have a long history of political implications and judicial second-guessing.

Yates’s memo is the latest in a series of guidelines drafted and tweaked over the years, often in the period leading to presidential elections. The effort started in 1999 with Eric Holder, the deputy attorney general at the time.