A risk management software company named Protecht last week put out a press release titled –  The Corporate Mistakes that Cost U.S. Businesses the Most.

Using data from the Good Jobs First Violation Tracker, Protecht analyzed over 180,000 corporate fines from 2020 to 2024, to discover what the most common types of corporate violations are, and which cost the most in fines. 

Protecht found that the costliest corporate violation for U.S. businesses is unapproved promotion of medical products. Financial violations have cost U.S. businesses $70 billion between 2020 and 2024 and the most common type of corporate offenses are safety violations.

The Protecht report is just the most recent case of companies, researchers, academics, reporters, investment managers and others using Violation Tracker to get results on major corporate crime and wrongdoing.

Violation Tracker is the most comprehensive public database of corporate crimes and other law violations. 

It contains 685,000 cases over the past 25 years. 

Violation Tracker is the brainchild of Philip Mattera of Good Jobs First in Washington, D.C.

How long have you been doing Violation Tracker?

“It will be ten years in the fall of this year,” Mattera told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “It’s grown a lot since then. Originally, we just covered a few federal agencies. Now it covers all federal agencies, all state agencies and attorneys general and even some local agencies around the country. We have almost 700,000 records in the Violation Tracker now. The records date back to 2000.”

At the University of Virginia Law School, there is the Corporate Prosecution Registry. The Justice Department has set up a Corporate Crime Database.

How does yours differ from those two?

“We cover civil as well as criminal cases. The vast majority of the cases in Violation Tracker are civil matters. But we do have criminal cases as well against companies. It also differs in that we have class action and multi district lawsuits.” 

What do you make of the Justice Department’s Corporate Crime Database?

“It’s pretty meager.” 

How many cases does it contain?

“The last time I checked there were about 150.” 

How many criminal cases are in Violation Tracker?

“We have about 2,100 criminal cases. Those go back to 2000.”

Why did you cut off the year to begin at 2000?

“It was difficult to get any earlier information on a systematic basis.”

Are you convinced that you have the vast majority of the cases since 2000 of all violations?

“Yes, we think we have a pretty complete list. We have scoured all the websites of all of the federal and state agencies. We are probably better with the information from the federal agencies than the state agencies. Some of the state agencies are not able to provide earlier information.”

You have both a free service and a paid service. What’s the difference between the two?

“With the paid service, you get the ability to download certain search results into a spreadsheet. The site is free to search and view search results. But if you want the convenience of being able to download into a spreadsheet, we ask that you pay for that because we have to support this work somehow.” 

Is your database fed automatically from government databases? Or do you feed it manually?

“It’s mostly manual. There are a couple of agencies that have big datasets that we can download – mainly EPA and OSHA. But for most of the agencies, including the Justice Department, the SEC and the others, we read through thousands of press releases and reports looking for new cases. And then we manually create them.” 

Do you include deferred and non prosecution agreements?

“Yes, the database has lots of deferred and non prosecution agreements and declinations.” 

Declinations with disgorgements or where there is some settlement?

“Yes, on the advanced search page you can limit your search to DPAs and NPAs. We have close to 600 NPAs and DPAs.”

Do you find that sometimes you come across a case that’s not included in your database – a case that you missed?

“It doesn’t happen that much. We spend a lot of time trying to be complete. And we check our sources. We look at other sources as well. We read the Corporate Crime Reporter among other publications to make sure we are not missing any cases.”

Is there any way you can ballpark how the new Trump administration is doing on bringing corporate crime cases?

“If we take all of the civil and criminal misconduct cases coming out of the federal government, there has definitely been a big drop, both in the number of cases and total penalties imposed. With some agencies it’s very dramatic. Obviously, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has not had a single new case since Trump took office. It’s not clear whether that agency still exists.”

“That’s an extreme example. But even at other agencies like the SEC – you are seeing a big drop in cases and penalties. The EPA has had a big drop. OSHA – same. Regulation and enforcement have not disappeared entirely, but there is less of it going on.” 

“It’s hard to tell right now how much of that is the result of policy decisions by the new administration and how much is the reflection of the chaos in many of the agencies brought about by DOGE and the budget cuts. But the result is that there is a lot less enforcement going on.”

“And you have written about how they are making moves to cancel investigations that have been under way, rescinding penalties or lowering penalties that had been previously imposed.”

“If the penalty is reduced, we will add a note indicating what happened. If the penalty is totally rescinded, I guess we have to remove it. But we are thinking about creating a separate list of these rescinded cases.”

You also have a global violation tracker. 

“Yes. Violation Tracker Global collects data from sixty countries. And it focuses primarily on cases against large multinationals. The U.S. version covers companies of all sizes. We are not seeing any significant drop from other countries. We are not seeing the same trend of restricted regulation in other parts of the world the way it is happening under Trump.”

Will the other countries be able to pick up the slack in prosecuting foreign bribery cases, for example?

“Some countries do have a history of prosecuting those cases. I assume they will continue to prosecute those cases.” 

“In other areas, the state regulators in the United States are picking up some of the slack. We are not seeing any kind of falloff in state regulatory enforcement. That’s encouraging.”

“For example, some of the states are stepping up to fill in for the CFPB. In New York the Attorney General, Letitia James, just announced that her office has secured a $250,000 settlement with MoneyGram for failing to follow consumer protection laws. This was after the CFPB ended its participation in a lawsuit against the company it had brought together with the New York Attorney General in 2022.”

Why isn’t corporate crime a bigger political issue in the United States?

“Politicians tend to focus on street crime and get people worked up about street crime but not about corporate crime. The average person has no idea about how much corporate misconduct there is. They will suddenly pay attention when there is a big scandal. And then it gets forgotten. That message about corporate criminality is not being reinforced constantly the way in which immigrant crime, for example, gets repeated over and over.” 

“One of the purposes of Violation Tracker is to try and remedy that. By documenting all of these cases, it makes it easier for people to research these cases and see the large number of cases associated with major corporations. Not every Fortune 500 company is in the Violation Tracker.  For example, Yum China is in the Fortune 500, but they are not in Violation Tracker because they don’t have any U.S. operations.” 

“But any company of any size that has operations in the United States has cases listed in Violation Tracker. For some companies, there are thousands of entries. Take Berkshire Hathaway. People love to lionize that company. But they are a huge conglomerate. And many of their operating companies show up in the database over and over again.” 

“I don’t know to what extent we are changing the awareness of the average person about corporate crime. But that’s one of the ambitions of the project.” 

[For the complete q/a format Interview with Philip Mattera, see 39 Corporate Crime Reporter 25(12), June 23, 2025, print edition only.]