Ralph Nader, Public Citizen and the Center for Corporate Policy sent have delivered a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, urging the Justice Department to prepare an annual report and public database on corporate crime in the United States.
“Currently, the Department of Justice does not compile comprehensive data on corporate crime,” Nader and the groups wrote. “This is a notable oversight. It is as if the Department of Education had no measures for how well our children learn, or if the U.S. Department of Agriculture had no idea of how much wheat or corn our farmers grew.”
Currently the Department of Justice does not compile comprehensive data on corporate crime. This is a notable oversight.
“It is as if the Department of Education had no measures for how well our children learn, or if the U.S. Department of Agriculture had no idea of how much wheat or corn our farmers grew,” Nader and the groups wrote.
“The failure to measure can lead to sloppy thinking, bad decisions and entrenched neglect. We urge the Department of Justice to equip itself with the power afforded by measurement and data analysis.
For street crime, the FBI oversees the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, which tracks data from over 18,000 local and state law enforcement agencies. The DOJ should launch a parallel program for corporate crime and law-breaking, including but not limited to antitrust and price-fixing, environmental crimes, financial crimes, overseas bribery, health care fraud, trade violations, labor and employment-related violations (discrimination and occupational injuries and death), consumer fraud and damage to consumer health and safety, and corporate tax fraud onshore and offshore.
“A pittance invested here will go a long way toward promoting more lawful corporate behavior and the critical public support the Department of Justice needs for adequate enforcement budgets and stronger laws,” they wrote.
“The Department of Justice should produce and maintain a corporate crime database. This is an elemental form of accountability; street criminals have rapsheets; corporate law-breakers ought to have them too. This could help to deter and punish such crime in many ways.
Nader and the groups said that at a minimum, the corporate crime database should:
* Be searchable by parent company, major subsidiaries, corporate official name, industry, type of crime, city, state, and date of crime.
* Contain individual company data, including the number of civil, administrative and criminal enforcement actions brought against corporate defendants by government agencies involving a felony charge, misdemeanor, or civil charge where potential fines may be $1,000 or more.
* Specify the agency bringing each charge, the charge, the name of the company charged (including the ultimate parent company), and the outcome of the action if any, including plea agreements, consent decrees, findings of innocence, convictions, and fines and other penalties.
In the 111th and 112th Congresses, Rep. John Conyers, ranking member of the House Committee on the Judiciary, introduced legislation titled the “Corporate Crime Database Act” (H.R. 6545 in 111th Congress, H.R. 323 in 112th Congress) to require the Department to establish and maintain such a database, and to make it available to the public via the Internet. Such proposals have been made by advocates for many years.