Violation Tracker Global has arrived. The new database, covering corporate crime and misconduct in 45 countries, is free to search at violationtrackerglobal.org.
VT Global is structured much like the U.S. and UK versions of Violation Tracker, but with an important difference: it focuses exclusively on cases linked to a universe of 1,600 large multinational corporations and their subsidiaries in the period since 2010. The database contains more than 50,000 penalties imposed on those companies by 700 regulatory agencies and other government bodies, including subsets of the data from the U.S. and the UK Trackers. Other countries covered are from both the Global North (such as Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and 17 members of the European Union) and the Global South (such as Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and India). More countries will be added in the future.
The cases in Violation Tracker Global are divided into eight broad offense groups: Competition/Antitrust, Consumer Protection, Employment, Environment, Financial, Government Contracting, Healthcare, and Safety. Each entry is also tagged with one of about 100 more specific offense categories, such as privacy/data protection violations, bribery, money laundering, and workplace safety. Penalties are shown both in the original currency and the U.S. dollar equivalent at the time of the penalty announcement.
Because of agency disclosure limitations, Violation Tracker Global does not have data in every category for all 45 countries. Particularly frustrating is the fact that regulators in numerous countries, including most of those in the European Union, do not make detailed enforcement information available in two categories: environmental and labor standards. Many of these same countries post extensive data on cases in categories such as banking, securities, and competition/antitrust. Where major cases have become public despite their absence from agency websites, we have created entries using reliable secondary sources.
This unevenness in disclosure practices is part of the reason financial institutions appear so prominently in Violation Tracker Global. The nearly 300 banks, insurance companies, and asset managers included in the database account for more than 40 percent of the total penalties, far more than any other sector. Seven of the 10 parent companies with the largest penalty totals are banks, including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, UBS, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Deutsche Bank.
Banks are also the biggest repeat offenders. Looking only at penalties of $1 million or more, the parents with the most cases of that size are UBS (114), Bank of America (111), JPMorgan Chase (101), and Citigroup (98). Two banks, HSBC and Citigroup, have been penalized in more countries than any other parent companies.
Plenty of corporations other than banks have substantial penalty totals. These include Volkswagen ($30 billion), BP ($26 billion), and Apple ($19 billion). Overall, 95 parent companies have received $1 billion or more in cumulative penalties since 2010.
Violation Tracker Global is a work in progress. Going forward, my colleagues and I will add information from more countries and seek to fill gaps in the online data through methods such as open records requests. In some countries, however, strict privacy rules will prevent us from obtaining full data. The data we have assembled so far makes it clear that illegality on the part of giant corporations is a worldwide phenomenon.
We hope Violation Tracker Global will be a useful tool for those promoting corporate accountability everywhere.