Unfortunately it's probably not serious crime. It would have been in the private sector, see Theranos, but not in academia. The USA is rather unusual in having the ORI, but it's toothless and does only a handful of announced sanctions per year. There aren't the laws on the books, nor prosecutors and investigative forces in governments dedicated to pursuing scientific fraud.
So I'm afraid to say that assuming the allegations are true, they will probably get away with it. It's absolutely standard when these sorts of things are discovered that everyone sweeps it under the rug as vigorously as possible.
Fixing it would be difficult. There are a huge variety of ways to produce fraudulent science. Even coming up with a law that captures half of them is fiendishly hard, and how to do enforcement in a timely manner? In this case capitalism came to the rescue because the investigation was funded by short sellers, so this has to be one of the best arguments for short selling around. But by the time there's a publicly listed company whose share price is dominated by research suspected to be fraudulent it's way too late.
There's probably also a fear of looking too closely. There's a culture of coverups in science that I've seen first hand. It's deeply unpleasant and breeds the suspicion that they do it so blatantly because it's become a way of life, because they know there won't be any consequences even if they're called out on it. If you start going after image tampering, well, it's only a tiny next step to say that if your paper reports a mean that's statistically impossible given the data set then that's also fraud. But then you'd have to investigate and mount prosecutions for a significant fraction of all psychology researchers. And then you're going to have to make it a crime to not share data on request as otherwise incriminating data is always going to be inconveniently lost. And then you're up to 90%+ of researchers facing action. Draining this swamp would be very hard.
So I'm afraid to say that assuming the allegations are true, they will probably get away with it. It's absolutely standard when these sorts of things are discovered that everyone sweeps it under the rug as vigorously as possible.
Fixing it would be difficult. There are a huge variety of ways to produce fraudulent science. Even coming up with a law that captures half of them is fiendishly hard, and how to do enforcement in a timely manner? In this case capitalism came to the rescue because the investigation was funded by short sellers, so this has to be one of the best arguments for short selling around. But by the time there's a publicly listed company whose share price is dominated by research suspected to be fraudulent it's way too late.
There's probably also a fear of looking too closely. There's a culture of coverups in science that I've seen first hand. It's deeply unpleasant and breeds the suspicion that they do it so blatantly because it's become a way of life, because they know there won't be any consequences even if they're called out on it. If you start going after image tampering, well, it's only a tiny next step to say that if your paper reports a mean that's statistically impossible given the data set then that's also fraud. But then you'd have to investigate and mount prosecutions for a significant fraction of all psychology researchers. And then you're going to have to make it a crime to not share data on request as otherwise incriminating data is always going to be inconveniently lost. And then you're up to 90%+ of researchers facing action. Draining this swamp would be very hard.