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The mission of the U.S. Justice Department is to enforce federal law, but when it comes to corporate offenders the DOJ often exhibits a puzzling reluctance to carry out that function.
A current example of this hesitancy involves Boeing. In 2021, in the wake of two crashes linked to defects in the company’s 737 MAX airliner, DOJ initiated a criminal investigation into whether Boeing conspired to mislead the Federal Aviation Administration about the safety of the plane.
Yet instead of filing charges, DOJ offered Boeing a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) under which it would pay about $2.5 billion in penalties while not having to plead guilty. DOJ declined to require the appointment of an independent monitor, but it required the company to strengthen its compliance and ethics procedures.
More than three years have passed, and the DOJ has concluded that Boeing has not lived up to its obligations. Rather than announcing it will now bring actual criminal charges, Boeing sent a letter to the federal judge overseeing the case saying it is “is determining how it will proceed in this matter.”
This sounds like a prelude to some other kind of leniency deal with the company. That might mean a modification of the current DPA or a new one.
Boeing’s failure to comply with the DPA is hardly unprecedented, and there have been plenty of examples of corporations that have been offered more than one leniency arrangement. Among the more than 500 deferred prosecution and non-prosecution agreements documented in Violation Tracker, there are about three dozen parent companies that have received more than one. Among those is Boeing, which in 2006 was allowed to enter into a non-prosecution agreement to resolve a case involving federal contracting violations.
Amazingly, there are ten parents that have been given more than two leniency agreements. These are mostly banks, both domestic (such as JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo) and foreign-based (such as Deutsche Bank and HSBC). The DOJ is willing to go to great lengths to help rogue banks avoid a guilty plea.
The rationale for leniency agreements is that they will prompt companies to clean up their practices. In all too many cases, that is not what happens. After getting its deal, the corporation ends up violating the same or other laws. At that point, DOJ should throw the book at the offender. When DOJ instead offers up more leniency, that makes a mockery of the process.
In the case of Boeing, more leniency would be especially ridiculous, given that the company is already the subject of a new criminal investigation stemming from an incident earlier this year in which a fuselage panel blew off an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX mid-flight.
At the very least, DOJ should file real criminal charges against Boeing for violating the DPA. The Department should also use this as an opportunity to rethink its entire approach to corporate criminality. The reliance on leniency is not working.
It is time to explore new forms of punishment that will compel large companies to take their legal obligations more serious—and thereby protect the public from the consequences of their misconduct.