Regulation

Enforcement Inaction

The Trump Administration has declared war on business regulation, both overtly and covertly. Most visible has been the barrage of executive orders that cripple or eliminate rules without going through the normal review procedures. Since the beginning of this month, Trump has put his Sharpie to orders that instruct agencies to unilaterally repeal regulations they deem unlawful and to insert sunset provisions into others.

There is also a quiet form of deregulation stemming from the fact that many agencies have scaled back their enforcement activities. It is difficult to determine how much of this is being caused by operational disruptions linked to DOGE-instigated layoffs and how much stems from deliberate decisions to abandon cases, but the result is a sharp drop-off in the number of announced fines and settlements.

Let’s focus on the agencies that normally handle the biggest cases. Not surprisingly, the most dramatic decline has come at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Elon Musk has targeted for elimination. Since Trump took office, the agency has announced only one new resolved case. On January 30 the payment service Wise was ordered to pay a $2 million fine for misleading customers. Since then, instead of new penalties, the agency has issued press releases about “regulatory relief” as well as a remarkable statement which criticized an anti-redlining action brought by the agency during the Biden Administration. In November, the CFPB had fined Townstone Financial $105,000 to settle allegations that the firm discouraged African Americans from applying for mortgages. Calling that case “abusive” and “unjust,” Acting CFPB Director Russ Vought vacated the settlement and returned the $105,000 to Townstone.

Since the inauguration, the Securities and Exchange Commission has announced only about a dozen resolved cases against companies. During the same period (January 20-April 16) of last year, the SEC announced more than 40 penalties. There is also a disparity in the amounts recovered. During that period last year, the average penalty was above $8 million; this year it has been about $2 million. Last year’s defendants included major companies such as Volkswagen and U.S. Bancorp; this year’s list includes much smaller firms.

The caseload at the Federal Trade Commission has also been low. Since January 20 it has announced only two penalties—one for $193,000 and another for $17 million. During the same period last year, the agency announced 11 penalties totaling more than $350 million. These are only cases with monetary sanctions, unlike the current lawsuit being pursued by the FTC against Meta Platforms, which, if successful, would likely result in structural changes at the company.

The situation at the Justice Department is more mixed. Combining both main Justice and the U.S. Attorneys Offices around the country, there have been nearly 70 announcements of penalties against businesses.

More than 50 of these actions were brought under the False Claims Act, the law designed to combat cheating by federal contractors, including healthcare companies dealing with Medicare and other Medicaid. Very few cases were brought in many of the other categories DOJ normally covers.

It is encouraging that DOJ is still paying attention to contractor abuse, but it is ironic that this is happening at the same time DOGE has been largely ignoring that abuse in its purported campaign to combat fraud at federal agencies. Perhaps the remaining righteous prosecutors at DOJ should teach Elon Musk where to look.

From Pro Bono to Pro Malo

When lawyers do pro bono work, it is assumed they are helping a worthy cause. Donald Trump has twisted this concept and made it part of his effort to punish law firms he views as enemies while furthering his retrograde environmental policies. He has created what amounts to pro malo publico—an activity that that promotes a public evil.

At a White House event during which Trump signed several executive orders promoting greater domestic coal production and consumption, he announced plans to pressure law firms to provide free legal services to coal companies to assist in leasing and other issues.

The firms involved would include those that have made deals with Trump to avoid punitive measures he threatened to impose on them because they represented Trump’s perceived enemies. As part of those deals, firms such as Paul Weiss and Skadden Arps agreed to provide pro bono services worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It was widely assumed these services would go to non-profit organizations, presumably with an emphasis on those with a pro-MAGA orientation.

Now Trump is taking the outlandish position that the recipients should include for-profit corporations. There is perhaps no industry less deserving of special assistance than coal. Much of the world is moving away from the black rock because of its outsized contribution to global warming and other forms of pollution.

Trump, who had made coal a centerpiece of his 2016 presidential campaign but was not able to do much to stem the industry’s decline, is now trying again. In doing so, he is seeking to prop up a sector whose harms are not limited to exacerbation of the climate crisis.

Among the largest producers is Core Natural Resources, the result of the 2024 merger of Arch Resources and CONSOL Energy. In Violation Tracker these companies account for more than $230 million in fines and settlements from some 800 enforcement actions relating to environmental and workplace safety infringements.

Another repeat offender is James C. Justice Companies, whose namesake is now a U.S. senator from West Virginia. While Jim Justice was still in charge, the company racked up hundreds of safety violations and resisted paying millions of dollars in federal and state safety fines. In 2016 an NPR investigation concluded that Justice’s company was “the nation’s top mine safety delinquent.” Sen. Justice was one of the attendees at Trump’s signing event.

At that event, Trump vowed “to identify and fight every single unconstitutional state or local regulation that’s putting our coal miners out of business.” It seems likely that the law firms being dragooned into serving the coal producers will end up helping to challenge these rules.

We need not express any concern for the lawyers. Skadden and other firms that have made deals with Trump have represented coal clients in the past. The bigger problem is that a group of companies doing great harm will be receiving an indirect subsidy in the form of free legal services—and the result could be a weakening of environmental and workplace safeguards. In other words, pro malo publico.

The Other U.S.-EU Economic Conflict

Tariffs are not the only economic arena in which the United States and Europe are at loggerheads. The Trump Administration and the European Union are coming to blows with regard to the oversight of business.

Trump, of course, is on a rampage against corporate regulation, especially when it comes to the environment and cryptocurrency. Rules are being slashed and enforcement is being reduced to the bare minimum. The one way in which Trump is coming down hard on business is his move to get companies to abandon anything that smacks of diversity and equity.

Now the administration is trying to export its anti-DEI crusade to Europe. The French newspaper Le Figaro recently reported that the American embassy in Paris sent letters to local companies demanding that they renounce DEI as a condition of doing business with the U.S. government. It later came out that similar letters were issued by the U.S. embassies in countries such as Belgium, Italy, and Spain.

European government officials have condemned the effort, accusing the Trump Administration of trying to impose its domestic culture war values on other countries. This critique of ideological imperialism is strong even in France, which tries to ignore race and has largely shunned DEI.

While the U.S. is promoting this frivolous oversight of foreign companies, Europe is getting tougher in its serious regulation of American corporations, especially the tech giants. The French antitrust authority just fined Apple 150 million euros for using a privacy feature in an anti-competitive manner. Last year the European Commission fined the company 1.8 billion euros for abusing its dominant position in the market for the distribution of music streaming apps and ordered Apple to repay 13 billion euros in improper tax breaks it received from Ireland.

An Italian court recently ordered Google to pay 326 million euros to resolve allegations it failed to pay proper taxes on its earnings. The company is still fighting a 4 billion euro fine imposed by the EU in 2018 for placing illegal restrictions on Android device manufacturers and mobile network operators to cement its dominant position in internet search market.

Last year the EU fined Meta Platforms nearly 800 million euros for imposing unfair trading conditions on other online classified ads service providers. Microsoft’s LinkedIn service was fined 310 million euros by the Irish Data Protection Commission for improper processing of personal data for the purposes of behavioral analysis and targeted advertising. Numerous other cases can be found by searching Violation Tracker Global.

Trump has taken note of such cases, and his new tariffs on EU countries are likely in part a form of retaliation. Yet there are no signs Europe is being cowed. In fact, the EU is expected to include regulatory measures against U.S. tech and financial companies in its response to Trump’s trade offensive.

While they may have misgivings about tariffs, U.S. companies seem inclined to seek help from the Trump Administration with their EU regulatory problems. The Wall Street Journal just reported that Mark Zuckerberg is lobbying U.S. officials to respond strongly to an expected EU ruling against Meta Platforms.

Zuckerberg is wasting his time. The Trump Administration is in no position to thwart EU enforcement actions. Everything it does only hardens Europe’s resistance.

A Gift to Money Launderers

Donald Trump wants to be seen as a law and order president. He is riding roughshod over due process to send purported Venezuelan gang members to a supermax prison in El Salvador, and he muses about doing the same with those who vandalize Tesla dealerships.

Yet when it comes to another group of miscreants, the Trump Administration turns softhearted. During the past two months, the federal government has adopted various kinds of leniency for corporate and white collar lawbreakers. The Justice Department has suspended enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. DOJ and the SEC have abandoned numerous investigations of corporate misconduct. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is being dismantled. The EPA is being neutered.

Most recently, the Treasury Department announced it would not enforce the beneficial ownership reporting provisions of the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) with regard to domestic companies. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called the move “a victory for common sense.”

Actually, it is a victory for money launderers. The CTA was enacted to address the problem of illicit money flows around the world. Opponents have been seeking to undo the CTA since its enactment in 2021. Their legal challenges appeared to be succeeding until the Supreme Court upheld the law earlier this year. Now the Treasury Department’s Financial Crime Enforcement Network (FinCEN) is using administrative procedures to severely restrict the scope of the law. As a result, the number of entities expected to report beneficial ownership will plunge from an estimated 32 million to about 20,000.

By exempting domestic entities from the CTA’s reporting requirements, FinCEN would have us believe that money laundering is primarily a problem outside the United States. One has only to look at the cases brought by FinCEN itself to see this is false.

As Violation Tracker documents, FinCEN has collected hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and settlements from U.S. financial institutions for offenses related to money laundering. For example, in 2021 Capital One paid $290 million to resolve allegations that its check cashing group failed to establish and maintain an effective anti-money laundering (AML) program.

U.S. casinos have also been penalized by FinCEN. One of those was the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. In 1998 the property, then still controlled by Trump, was fined $477,000 for currency transaction reporting violations. The Taj Mahal subsequently received numerous warnings about such issues, and in 2015, by which time it was controlled by Carl Icahn, the casino was fined $10 million for willful and repeated violations of the Bank Secrecy Act.

Scores of other AML cases have been brought against U.S. companies by the Justice Department. These include a $586 million settlement paid by Western Union on charges of willfully failing to maintain an effective AML program and aiding and abetting wire fraud. This case and numerous others involved criminal charges that were usually resolved with a non-prosecution or deferred prosecution leniency agreement.

Many other domestic AML enforcement actions have been brought by bank regulators—including the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation—as well as the SEC, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and state attorneys general.

In other words, money laundering and AML deficiencies are very much a domestic problem which will now grow only worse with the undermining of the Corporate Transparency Act.

Toxic Gaslighting

Donald Trump loves gas. In his address to Congress he bragged about a natural gas pipeline project in Alaska that he claimed will involve trillions of dollars in investment.

Trump also loves gaslighting. His speech contained many statements divorced from reality, but perhaps the most egregious was his attempt to depict his administration as working “to get toxins out of our environment, poisons out of our food supply, and keep our children healthy and strong.”

This came not long after Trump boasted about freezing new regulations and declaring that no new rule could be adopted without eliminating ten existing ones.

When Trump chose Lee Zeldin to run the EPA there was a glimmer of hope the former Congressman who once worked with conservationists would respect the mission of the agency. Yet it turned out Zeldin is perfectly willing to be Trump’s hatchetman. He has gone along with the simultaneous attack on renewable energy and unleashing of fossil fuel projects.

Zeldin is also inviting numerous foxes into the henhouse. This threatens not only climate policies but also the EPA’s efforts to control the very same toxics Trump just vowed to eliminate. Two of those foxes were brought in from the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry’s leading trade association. They are Nancy Beck and Ann Dekleva, both of whom were put in key positions in the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety. Dekleva, who worked for three decades at chemical giant DuPont, is known for her role in fighting EPA regulation of the carcinogen formaldehyde.

Zeldin has brought in a slew of other industry lobbyists through the reverse revolving door to take positions in which they will be overseeing policy affecting their former employers, especially those in the petroleum industry.

As the lobbyists are coming in, large numbers of career EPA employees are being forced out as part of the DOGE blitzkrieg. The Administration is also dismantling the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, which handles cases against polluters that end up in court. Meanwhile, DOJ is reportedly planning to drop a lawsuit alleging that a petrochemical plant in Louisiana operated by Denka Performance Elastomer endangers the residents of the neighboring majority-Black community with its releases of cancer-causing chloroprene.

Cases such as this one had been brought as part of efforts to promote environmental justice, which Trump is abolishing after demonizing it as a form of DEI.

Corporate capture is not limited to the EPA. As Trump was claiming to protect the food supply, the New York Times reported that the new director of the Food and Drug Administration’s food division is a corporate lawyer who represented Abbott Laboratories, a major producer of infant formula, in a lawsuit accusing the company of failing to adequately warn parents that its specialized formula for premature infants was associated with an elevated risk of a deadly bowel condition.

Trump’s far-fetched claims about environmental protection and food safety were not meant to be taken literally. They served as a segue to what came next in the speech: an exaggerated statement about the rise of autism among American children. Trump then vowed that his Administration would find the cause and that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would lead the effort.

At this point it became clear that the whole point of the passage about toxins was to signal that RFK Jr. was being given free rein to pursue his anti-vaccine agenda. While virtually all legitimate environmental and food/drug safety initiatives are being crippled, Trump seems willing to allow Kennedy to use the federal government to pursue his obsession. The measles outbreak in Texas is a sign of what is to come as regulation and public health are replaced by conspiracy theories.

Note: For more on Trump’s abandonment of enforcement actions against polluters and other corporate miscreants, see this new report from Public Citizen.

Behind the Chaos

Donald Trump and Elon Musk seem gleeful about the chaos they have unleashed on the federal workforce. Claims that the onslaught is designed to root out fraud and waste while promoting efficiency are spurious. The examples of waste offered by DOGE are usually erroneous or trivial, and there is nothing efficient about the way agencies are being ravaged. Nor does it make sense to fire inspectors general, the professionals most skilled at addressing corruption.

Is there any method to the madness? Behind the noise there seem to be two objectives. The first is a new form of deregulation. In the past, corporate-friendly administrations sought to diminish oversight of business by rescinding rules and changing laws.

Trump and Musk are instead trying to achieve those objectives by crippling regulatory bodies. This is happening in part by asserting full control over independent agencies and installing loyalists to oversee them. Even more aggressive is the effort to prevent the agencies from functioning by decimating their staff. Regulations don’t mean much if no one is available to investigate non-compliance and take enforcement action. The administration also seems to be testing whether it can get away with unilaterally closing entire agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without the consent of Congress. This is brute force deregulation.

The second objective is to create opportunities for government contractors. Despite the attempt to depict many government functions as redundant or unnecessary, many of the activities being targeted for large-scale staff reductions are not really expendable. By drastically reducing head count, Trump and Musk are creating conditions under which agencies will have no choice but to outsource more work to the private sector.

It is telling that amid all its fabricated charges about waste and abuse, DOGE focuses very little on the major source of fraud in the federal government: dishonest contractors. When it is functioning normally, the Justice Department spends a good portion of its time going after these companies. Violation Tracker documents 4,000 cases brought under the False Claims Act resulting in more than $60 billion in penalties. And those are just the cases in which the contractor got caught.

At times, Musk targets contracts, but they are usually small outlays related to now-taboo areas such as DEI and environmental justice. If he were serious about addressing fraud, he would be singling out large corporations such as Booz Allen and Centene that have been involved in major false claims cases. Companies such as these are presumably being shielded because they are the ones to which agencies will turn for help in performing the functions their diminished staffs can no longer handle.

In some cases, the DOGE offensive may be paving the way not just for outsourcing but for complete privatization. Among the functions said to be candidates for private sector takeover are FEMA disaster relief, NOAA’s National Weather Service, and the Education Department’s student loan program.

There is nothing new, of course, about presidential efforts to reduce business oversight and increase outsourcing. What’s different is the lawless way Trump and Musk are pursuing these aims. And then there’s the added scandal in the fact that Musk personally stands to gain so much from weakened enforcement and expanded contracting.

It is not yet clear how the DOGE juggernaut can be stopped, but for now it is helpful to look behind the theatrics and see whose interests are being served.

Putting Military Families at Risk

I don’t recall Donald Trump saying during the presidential campaign that he planned to make his supporters helpless against predatory lenders and financial scam artists, but that is apparently what he is about to do at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Trump has ousted CFPB director Rohit Chopra, a zealous champion of consumer protection, and given control of the agency to Scott Bessent, the former hedge fund manager who is already serving as Treasury Secretary.

Bessent’s first act was to order a halt to all activities at the CFPB, including rulemaking and enforcement. He issued a statement saying: “I look forward to working with the CFPB to advance President Trump’s agenda to lower costs for the American people and accelerate economic growth.” Translation: I will slash regulation and perpetuate the myth that reduced oversight works to the benefit of consumers.

The firing of Chopra and freezing of CFPB activities come as welcome news to major financial institutions and fly-by-night operators, both of which have sought to neutralize the agency ever since it began operation in 2011. The agency was also a frequent target of criticism from Congressional Republicans, who hated the fact that the law creating the CFPB provided that the director could only be removed for cause. In 2020 the conservative majority of the Supreme Court threw out that provision, meaning that the director could be removed at will by the President.

As shown in Violation Tracker, the CFPB has over its life collected more than $17 billion in fines and settlements, much of which has gone to affected consumers in the form of restitution. The cases, numbering more than 250, have involved a wide range of financial misconduct, from the Wells Fargo bogus account scandal to the deceptive practices of for-profit colleges.

Let’s focus on one subset of cases in which the CFPB has been especially active: cases brought against lenders that prey on military families. The agency has collected more than $146 million in penalties in a dozen such cases. A big share of that total comes from a $92 million settlement reached in 2014 with Colfax Capital and Culver Capital, also known as Rome Finance. The case, brought in cooperation with 13 state attorneys general, accused Rome Finance of luring servicemembers with the promise of instant financing on expensive electronics but then masked the finance charges with inflated prices in marketing materials and later withheld key information on monthly bills. Richard Cordray, CFPB’s director at the time, stated: “Rome Finance’s business model was built on fleecing servicemembers.”

In 2023 the CFPB found that TMX Finance, known as TitleMax, violated the Military Lending Act by extending prohibited title loans to military families, often charging nearly three times more than the 36% annual interest rate cap. The agency said TitleMax tried to hide its unlawful activities by, among other things, altering the personal information of military borrowers to circumvent their protected status. The CFPB also found that TitleMax increased loan payments for borrowers by charging unlawful fees. The agency ordered the company to pay more than $5 million in consumer relief and a $10 million civil money penalty.

Large financial institutions have also been called out by the CFPB for cheating military families. U.S. Bank and one of its nonbank partner companies, Dealers’ Financial Services, were required to return about $6.5 million to servicemembers for failing to properly disclose all the fees charged to participants in the companies’ Military Installment Loans and Educational Services auto loans program, and for misrepresenting the true cost and coverage of add-on products financed along with the auto loans.

Those who would eliminate or defang the CFPB—especially those who take every opportunity to express their support for the troops–should be made to made to acknowledge that their actions will make military families, as well as millions of others, more vulnerable to financial predators.

Attacking DEI, Enabling Discrimination

The early days of Trump 2.0 have been marked by a preoccupation with rooting out every last trace of DEI policies. Many programs are being abolished, and diversity officials are being terminated. The administration even tried to bring all federal grants and loans to a halt in order to make absolutely sure nothing was going out the door that promoted what the Office of Management and Budget called “Marxist equity.” Newly minted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to regard DEI as a bigger threat than ISIS.

What was originally a response by the Right to the supposed excesses of wokeness is now starting to resemble a new Red Scare, complete with calls for federal employees to inform on colleagues who try to conceal DEI activities.

The harmful effects of this extend beyond the career prospects of diversity bureaucrats. One example can be found at a federal agency called the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. The mission of the OFCCP is to ensure that employers doing business with the federal government comply with laws and regulations regarding workplace discrimination. Given that the feds pay out some $750 billion a year to an estimated three million contractors, the OFCCP is responsible for preventing unfair treatment of a large portion of the workforce.

OFCCP’s ability to do its job has been hampered by a Trump executive order that rescinds legal authority the agency has had since 1965 to investigate discrimination and promote affirmative action (the old name for DEI). The thrust of Trump’s order is to bar the agency from pursuing the DEI portion of its mission, but it is unclear whether it will still be able to hold contractors accountable for discriminating against groups of workers based on gender, race, national origin, or sexual orientation. Instead, the order commands the OFCCP to focus on eradicating DEI, which is depicted as the real discrimination.

Trump’s action seems to put an end to decades of enforcement activity in which the OFCCP pressured companies to change their hiring, promotion, and pay practices. In Violation Tracker we document more than 500 OFCCP cases dating back to 2000. Among the largest settlements are the following:

In 2017 Qualcomm paid $19.5 million to resolve allegations that it paid female engineers less than their male counterparts.

In 2019 Goldman Sachs paid just under $10 million to settle allegations it engaged in pay discrimination against Black, Hispanic, Asian, and female employees.

About 40 other companies have paid settlements of $1 million or more. Food distributors Sysco and US Foods have been involved in the largest number of cases, with nine each. Scores of Fortune 500 corporations are among those penalized by the OFCCP.

Now the Trump Administration has in effect pardoned these companies for their mistreatment of workers. This is a significant retreat from the principle that taxpayer dollars should not go to the bad actors of the business world—and it is another sign that, despite the populist trappings, MAGA policy ends up serving the interests of corporations.

The Inaugural Rogues Gallery

A news photograph on the inaugural ceremony that ran on the front page of the Wall Street Journal showed Elon Musk right behind Trump and his family members as Chief Justice Roberts administered the oath of office. It came awfully close to the recent New York cover cartoon depicting Musk putting his hand on the bible along with Trump’s.

Other photos revealed that Musk was not the only corporate figure given a prominent position in the limited confines of the Capitol Rotunda. Prime spots went to a line-up of tech moguls, including Mark Zuckerberg of Meta Platforms, Sundar Pichai of Alphabet/Google, Tim Cook of Apple, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com. A presidency that purports to be about economic populism began by seeming to signal that corporate CEOs and billionaires will have an outsized role.

What makes the deference shown to those business figures all the more unseemly is that they head companies with checkered regulatory compliance records. Here are some of their transgressions, as documented in Violation Tracker.

Meta Platforms has racked up more than $7 billion in penalties since 2000. The bulk of that comes from a $5 billion penalty imposed on Facebook in 2019 by the Federal Trade Commission for deceiving users about their ability to control the privacy of their personal information. Last year, Meta had to pay more than $1 billion to settle allegations by the Texas Attorney General that it captured personal biometric data without authorization.

Alphabet, parent of Google, has amassed $2.7 billion in penalties largely from antitrust, privacy, and other consumer protection cases. Its biggest payout was a $700 million settlement in 2023 with state attorneys general to resolve allegations of monopolistic practices in its app store. The year before, it paid out $391 million to state AGs to settle a case alleging it misled users about the collection and use of their personal data.

Apple has accumulated $1.4 billion in penalties, mainly from cases involving anti-competitive practices and consumer protection violations. For example, in 2020 it paid $113 million to settle a case brought by over 30 state attorneys general in connection with its decision to throttle the performance of iPhones to avoid addressing a problem with battery performance. In 2014 it paid $32 million to resolve FTC allegations it unfairly charged consumers for in-app purchases incurred by children without their parents’ consent.

Amazon has managed to avoid any ten-figure penalties, but it has been penalized much more often than the other tech giants, with 173 entries in Violation Tracker. The largest portion of these involve workplace safety, given the high level of ergonomic injuries in the company’s distribution centers. Recently, OSHA pressed Amazon to sign a corporate-wide agreement to try to improve conditions.

Tesla, SpaceX, and other businesses owned by Musk have accumulated “only” about $100 million in penalties but they are involved in numerous current regulatory controversies, including some related to their extensive contracts with the federal government.

It is also worth noting that all these companies have been involved in regulatory offenses outside the United States and may be hoping that the Trump Administration can pressure the European Union, for instance to ease up on the oversight.

As shown in Violation Tracker Global, Apple has paid out more than $18 billion in penalties to foreign countries since 2010, including a case last year in which it was ordered by the European Commission to repay 13 billion euros to Ireland to make up for illegal tax breaks. Earlier last year, the Commission fined Apple 1.8 billion euros for abusing its dominant position in the market for the distribution of music streaming apps to iPhone and iPad users through its App Store.

Alphabet has paid out 7 billion euros to the Commission for anti-competitive practices and 965 million euros to French authorities for improper shifting of profits to evade taxes. Meta has paid over 2 billion euros in a series of cases brought by the Irish Data Protection Commission for privacy violations. Amazon was fined 746 million euros by the data protection agency in Luxembourg.

In short, the companies given a place of honor at Trump’s inauguration are serial regulatory violators that have apparently decided that cozying up to the new Administration may pay off at home and abroad.

The 2024 Corporate Rap Sheet

My colleagues and I collected more than 22,000 new entries for the U.S. version of Violation Tracker this year. We also launched Violation Tracker Global, which contains cases brought against large corporations in 52 countries. Here are some of the most notable cases of the year from both databases.

McKinsey and Opioids. McKinsey, the leading management consulting firm, had to pay $650 million in criminal and civil penalties to resolve a U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) case concerning its work for the disgraced pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma. McKinsey was charged with conspiring with Purdue to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin while misleading users about the addiction risks of the opioid.

TD Bank and Money Laundering. TD Bank N.A., a U.S. subsidiary of Canada’s Toronto-Dominion, pleaded guilty and agreed to pay $1.9 billion in fines and forfeiture to resolve DOJ charges that it violated the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to file reports on suspicious transactions and thereby facilitated money laundering by criminal networks.

BHP, Vale and a Mining Disaster. Mining giants BHP and Vale, co-owners of the Samarco joint venture, agreed to a US$31 billion settlement to resolve litigation brought by Brazilian communities destroyed by the 2015 Mariana mine-waste dam collapse that killed 19 people and polluted 400 miles of rivers.

Raytheon and Fraud and Bribery. Raytheon Company, a subsidiary of military contractor RTX (formerly known as Raytheon Technologies), agreed to pay over $950 million to resolve a DOJ criminal investigation into a major fraud scheme involving defective pricing on certain government contracts and violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the Arms Export Control Act.

3M and PFAS. A federal judge in South Carolina gave final approval to a class action settlement in which 3M agreed to pay an estimated $12.5 billion to more than 10,000 public water systems to resolve allegations that PFAS chemicals produced by the company for use in firefighting foam ended up contaminating water sources.

Apple and Improper Tax Breaks. The European Commission ordered Apple to repay 13 billion euros to Ireland after determining that the special tax breaks the company had been receiving for 16 years amounted to a form of illegitimate state aid.

Meta Platforms and Biometric Data. Facebook parent Meta Platforms agreed to pay $1.4 billion to the Texas Attorney General’s office to settle a lawsuit alleging it improperly captured biometric data from millions of users for its facial recognition system without the authorization required by state law.

Teva Pharmaceuticals and Copaxone. The European Commission fined Teva 462 million euros for abusing its dominant position to delay competition to Copaxone, its medication for the treatment of multiple sclerosis. The Commission found that Teva artificially extended the patent protection of Copaxone and systematically spread misleading information about a competing product to hinder its market entry and uptake.

Uber Technologies and Wage Theft. Uber paid $148 million to settle a case brought by the Massachusetts Attorney General alleging that it violated state wage and hour law in the way it paid its drivers. The agreement also required the company to begin paying a minimum wage of $32.50 an hour and providing benefits such as paid sick leave. The case also targeted Lyft, which paid $27 million.

Glencore and Bribery. The Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland ordered commodities trading company Glencore to pay a penalty equal to about $152 million for failing to take steps to prevent the bribery of government officials in the Democratic Republic of Congo by a business partner.

Walgreens and False Claims. Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. and Walgreen Co. agreed to pay $106 million to the DOJ to resolve alleged violations of the False Claims Act and state statutes for billing government health care programs for prescriptions never dispensed.

Veolia and a Workplace Death. A British subsidiary of France’s Veolia Group pleaded guilty to breaching the Health and Safety at Work Act after a worker died and another was seriously injured while decommissioning a North Sea gas rig. The Health and Safety Executive fined the company £3 million and ordered it to pay £60,000 in costs.

Goldman Sachs and Apple Card Users. The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered Goldman Sachs to pay $64 million in fines and redress for mishandling customer service breakdowns affecting thousands of Apple Card holders. These failures meant that consumers faced long waits to get money back for disputed charges and some had incorrect negative information added to their credit reports.

You can find many more examples of the year’s corporate scandals in Violation Tracker and Violation Tracker Global. There is every reason to believe there will be many more cases for the Trackers to document in the coming year.