Research Tools: Violation Tracker (Database of U.S. Corporate Crime and Misconduct) Nearly Doubles in Size
From Violation Tracker/Good Jobs First:
An expansion of Violation Tracker, the first public database of corporate crime and misconduct in the United States, now makes it possible to access details of cases ranging from the big business scandals of the early 2000s during the Bush administration through those of the Trump administration to date. Violation Tracker, produced by the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First, is available at no charge.
“With coverage from 2000 onward, Violation Tracker now spans the entire modern corporate crime wave from Enron and WorldCom through Wells Fargo and Volkswagen,” said Good Jobs First Research Director Philip Mattera, who leads the work on the database. Previously the database covered the period since 2010.
The expansion nearly doubles the size of Violation Tracker to 300,000 entries, which together account for more than $394 billion in fines and settlements. As a measure of how corporate crime is concentrated within big business, 95 percent of those penalty values were assessed against only 2,800 large parent companies whose subsidiaries are linked together in the database. Approximately 200,000 smaller businesses account for the remaining five percent of the dollar total.
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Violation Tracker’s entries, which come from more than 40 federal regulatory agencies and the major divisions of the U.S. Justice Department, cover a wide array of civil and criminal offenses, including: violations of environmental, workplace safety, drug safety, consumer product safety, and transportation safety regulations; banking, securities, and accounting fraud; price-fixing; collective bargaining and fair labor standards violations; employment discrimination; False Claims Act cases; foreign bribery; money laundering; and corporate tax evasion. Cases handled solely by individual U.S. Attorney offices and by state agencies will be added later.
A full list of covered agencies is provided here.
Each entry links to an official online information source. In many cases, we also link to archival copies of documents preserved on the Good Jobs First server. The latter include some 3,500 entries created from documents obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests when agency data was not available online. Several of those FOIA requests are still pending.
Violation Tracker enables searching the data in numerous ways. The latest addition is a feature allowing for searches by NAICS industry codes for entries from agencies that provide that information.
Direct to Violation Tracker
Read the Complete Announcement
See Also: Subsidy Tracker
Also from Good Jobs First. “Subsidy Tracker is the first national search engine for economic development subsidies and other forms of government financial assistance to business.”
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About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.