Last month, Violation Tracker UK put out a report titled – Penalties: No Leniency for People, but Plenty for Corporations. The report looked at the steep fines drivers face for not paying tolls online – fines as high as $282.
“Such high penalties for minor, and clearly in this case accidental, infractions of the rules stand in stark contrast to the way penalties work in relation to corporate rule breaking,” the report found. “Of the 5,293 corporate violations announced in 2025 and documented in Violation Tracker UK, 2,155 carried no monetary penalty at all. And when fines are imposed, the amounts tend to be low.”
“Between April and July 2025, employers who breached labor law paid a combined $10.5 million at employment tribunals, over $5.3 million less than motorists forgetting the Blackwall Tunnel charge in the equivalent time period.”
Maia Kirby is an outreach coordinator at Violation Tracker UK and authored the report.
It’s a database of corporate crimes.
“We launched Violation Tracker UK October 2021,” Kirby told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “It enables activists to do corporate accountability. In 2022, we got funding to launch an outreach effort. I was one of two outreachers to do that.”
“For a couple of years, we met with lots of different groups – trade unionists, journalists, campaigners, academics. And now we are in a new phase. We made those connections, we listened to what work was being done. We have mastered the data. We got a sense of the landscape of enforcement in the UK. Now we are working with different organizations to use the data in different ways.”
Violation Tracker is the best corporate crime database in the United States. Is your version the best in the UK also?
“Absolutely. Prior to Violation Tracker UK, people would have to go to individual agencies to find this information. Some agencies would delete data after six months. Some would publish. You would have to get it by freedom of information laws. It was all very piecemeal. And there was very low public awareness. Who was in charge of what? It is quite a complex system. Violation Tracker UK brings all of the available information together in one place. You can put in the name of a company and up comes its record across different regulatory agencies.”
Are the UK and the US the only countries with Violation Trackers?
“Last year we launched Violation Tracker global. In fact, the UK Violation Tracker was a stepping stone to Violation Tracker Global. There was great appetite for it here in terms of what it could do for the social protection movement, the urgency the data could lend for better corporate accountability.”
How does Violation Tracker UK differ from Violation Tracker US?
“In the states, it takes a minimum penalty of $5,000 to get into the database. Here we collect everything because so much of regulatory enforcement in the UK doesn’t carry a monetary penalty. Take health care offenses as an example. They rarely will be prosecuted. They mostly are warning letters or at most a cancellation of service. Because there are so few monetary penalties, we gather everything from notices to prosecutions. There are all different ways in which enforcement is done in the UK.”
In the United States, Violation Tracker in the US includes civil actions. Do you include civil actions?
“We don’t have the same culture of civil litigation here in the UK. The civil cases are very few in number and they are very hard to get hold of. They are often settled behind closed doors. But we do include employment tribunal cases. Unlike in the US, almost all employment violations are dealt with by individual workers taking a case to an employment tribunal here in the UK. We gather every time a company has lost an employment tribunal case. That’s a huge dataset. And it’s very time consuming to go through and make sure we accurately enter that data.”
I came across your work when you sent me a blog post titled – Penalties for Corporations, Leniency for Corporate Crime. What did you find there?
“The reality of UK enforcement is that penalties are shockingly low for corporate crime. We did a piece back in 2024 that compared US regulatory penalties to UK regulatory penalties. And across the board, the UK was trailing massively behind. Then we looked at individual penalties – parking tickets or fines when drivers fail to pay a toll. And those penalties are astronomical. We looked at the disparities between when a corporation engages in wrongdoing and when a driver forgets to pay a fine.”
What other studies have you done based on the Violation Tracker?
“This year, we’ve looked at social care companies. We looked at how well the regulation of this sector was doing. We found that it was failing to hold companies accountable. We have also looked at procurement, in particular the government’s strategic suppliers. Another project looked at the UK government’s licensing of companies that allows them to sponsor migrant workers to come to the UK and work here. We looked at how many of these companies were breaking employment law and were still given a license to sponsor despite quite serious infringements. That’s a taste of the work that we do. I have a colleague looking at environmental enforcement data. You can check out our blog where we document our studies.”
When you type in the word fines or fined into Google News in the United States, you come up with individuals being fined for speeding, or littering, or sports teams or players being fined. There are very few corporate wrongdoing cases. So, we have a similar problem here in the United States. What impact has your work had on public perception of corporate crime in the UK and changing public policy?
“We have made a few headlines. And we are constantly adding new data to Violation Tracker. So there is growing potential for more stories along these lines. We don’t tend to do policy asks, because the organization is US based, even though as a team we are based here in the UK.”
“We tend to provide the data and team up with people who use it to demand policy changes. We are certainly creating networks where we can join forces and create coalitions for change. We are listening to what organizations are doing, listening to the stories of the human impact of corporate crime. That’s a big one, because the human stories are what captures people’s imaginations. And those stories are rarely told. We work with grassroots organizations that come across these stories all the time. And we can add the headline, we can add the urgency to those stories. Putting these things together can create a powerful action group.”
The UK has a corporate manslaughter statute that we do not have. That makes it easier for regulators to go after employers for death on the job.
“We might have a law, but there is a lack of use of this law. The law has essentially failed. There have only been very few cases – 31 cases – where corporate manslaughter has been successfully prosecuted. One of the difficulties is proving intent and being able to tie that to the company. The first case was in 2011. There are many more cases handled as health and safety breaches. Those are handled by the Health and Safety Executive. And there will be a fine – usually about a million pounds – where there is a worker fatality and a failure to deliver a proper risk assessment. You will see that kind of a prosecution, but rarely under the corporate manslaughter law, because of the difficulty in bringing that type of prosecution.”
There are non profits in the United States, like Public Citizen, that have been pushing for the Justice Department here to create a comprehensive database on corporate crime by requiring public companies to disclose all litigation and settlements, for example. In response, the Justice Department did put up a skeletal corporate crime database. But the government could be more comprehensive than Violation Tracker by requiring publicly held companies to report any and all cases brought against the company and settlements or verdicts. Is there a similar government database in the UK?
“In our dealings with government officials here, they have told us they are very glad to have access to Violation Tracker UK, because the UK government could never create something like this because they could never decide who would be in charge of it. Under the new procurement law, there will be a list of companies that should be debarred from public contracting. We will wait to see how comprehensive that list is. We recently did some research that showed how ineffective that law is going to be given the lack of enforcement across the board. That’s because for a company to be excluded from public contracts, they have to be convicted. And because there are so few convictions, this will debar very few companies.”
What reports are you working on now?
“We are looking at a big project on corporate landlords and violations. We are looking at a big annual roundup. We are looking at trends. Most of all, we are opportunistic. We are constantly looking for new projects.”
[For the complete q/a format Interview with Maia Kirby, see 39 Corporate Crime Reporter 38(14), October 6, 2025, print edition only.]