Violation Tracker

The Other Regulators

When it comes to business regulation, we tend to focus on federal agencies, which for the financial sector means the SEC, the CFPB, the Federal Reserve and the like. Yet there is another world of financial regulation at the state level, which at a time of weakening enforcement is more important than ever.

My colleagues and I at the Corporate Research Project have just completed a deep dive in this world for a major expansion of Violation Tracker. We collected enforcement data dating back to the beginning of 2000 for each state’s regulatory agencies dealing with banking, consumer finance, insurance and securities. In all, we created 15,000 entries with total penalties of more than $17 billion.

The number of cases and penalty amounts vary greatly from state to state. Among the more than 150 agencies we looked at, some disclosed hundreds of successful enforcement actions while others reported a few dozen. Some states are active in one of the areas we examined and weak in others.

The state that has by far collected the most in overall penalties is New York, whose total is more than $11 billion. Its Department of Financial Services has gone after the world’s biggest financial institutions and has won major settlements such as the $2.2 billion paid by the French bank BNP Paribas for violating international economic sanctions and the $715 million paid by the Swiss bank Credit Suisse for facilitating tax evasion.

California is second in penalties at just over $1 billion but far ahead in the number of cases. Its financial regulatory agencies have carried out more than 2,000 successful actions. Their biggest settlement was the $225 million paid in 2017 by Ocwen Loan Servicing for mortgage abuses.

Three other states have collected more than $100 million in penalties: Arizona ($665 million in 488 cases), Texas ($632 million in 1,097 cases) and New Jersey ($339 million in 398 cases).

If we focus on the area of insurance, in which the states have pretty much exclusive jurisdiction, the largest number of penalties of $5,000 or more were found in California (1,475), Texas (950) and Virginia (633). Yet in terms of total penalty dollars, New York was first with $808 million, followed by Texas ($617 million) and California ($541 million).

We also identified more than 100 cases in which regulators from different states brought cases jointly. These actions are similar to the multi-state attorneys general cases we analyzed in our Bipartisan Crime Fighting by the States report published in September 2019.

The cases brought by groups of state insurance and securities regulators have yielded about $2 billion in penalties since 2000. The companies that have paid the most in penalties in these cases are: Citigroup ($251 million), American International Group ($204 million), Bank of America ($201 million) and the Swiss bank UBS ($179 million).

Looking at both single-state and multi-state actions in banking, insurance and securities combined, the companies that have paid the most in total penalties turn out to be the big foreign banks, which account for every spot in the top ten. That New York sanctions case puts BNP Paribas on top with more than $2 billion, followed by Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse.

The U.S. companies with the largest overall penalty totals are State Farm Insurance ($368 million), UnitedHealth Group ($354 million), Citigroup ($295 million), American International Group ($275 million) and MetLife ($263 million).

With the addition of the state financial cases, Violation Tracker now contains 437,000 cases with total penalties of $627 billion imposed by more than 50 federal and 200 state and local agencies.

Rescuing the Cheaters

The federal government has been sending tens of billions of dollars in aid to the country’s hospitals under the Provider Relief Fund created by the CARES Act. That’s all well and good. Yet there is an awkward aspect to this: quite a few of the recipients have been accused of cheating the federal government in the past.

I’ve been working closely with the relief fund data in recent days, in order to prepare it for uploading to Covid Stimulus Watch. I’ve noticed that numerous recipients are hospital chains that have been involved in cases brought under the False Claims Act (FCA), the law that is widely used by the federal government to go after healthcare providers and contractors for billing irregularities or other improprieties in their dealings with Uncle Sam.

Matching the Provider Relief Fund recipients to the FCA data my colleagues and I have collected for Violation Tracker, I found more than 100 overlaps for the period extending back to 2010. These include both for-profit and non-profit hospital systems.

The company that has received the most from the basic Provider Relief Fund (there is a separate set of awards to hospitals that have treated large numbers of covid patients) is also the hospital chain that has paid the most in FCA penalties over the past decade: Tenet Healthcare.

In 2016 Tenet and two of its subsidiaries had to pay over $513 million to resolve criminal charges and civil claims relating to a scheme to defraud the United States and to pay kickbacks in exchange for patient referrals. The subsidiaries pled guilty to conspiracy charges.

Community Health Systems, another big for-profit hospital chain participating in the relief fund, has been involved in ten different FCA controversies over the past decade. In 2018 one of its subsidiaries had to pay $260 million to resolve criminal charges and civil claims that it knowingly billed government health care programs for inpatient services that should have been billed as outpatient or observation services; paid remuneration to physicians in return for patient referrals; and submitted inflated claims for emergency department facility fees.

Among the non-profit relief fund recipients with FCA problems is Michigan-based Beaumont Health, one of whose hospitals had to pay $84 million in 2018 to resolve allegations that it made payments to referring physicians that violated the Anti-Kickback Act as well as the FCA.

CommonSpirit Health, the large Catholic health system, has numerous affiliates receiving relief funds that have faced FCA allegations. For example, in 2014 Dignity Health had to pay $37 million to resolve allegations that 13 of its hospitals in California, Nevada and Arizona knowingly submitted false claims to Medicare and TRICARE by admitting patients who could have been treated on a less costly, outpatient basis.

Altogether, at least 103 health systems whose facilities are participating in the relief fund have paid more than $4 billion in False Claims Act settlements and fines over the past decade.

Given the magnitude of the covid crisis, it would be difficult to argue that these providers should be denied assistance. Yet there should at least be additional safeguards put in place to make sure that they do not engage in similar transgressions when it comes to CARES Act funds.

Note: A list of companies receiving $500,000 or more from the Provider Relief Fund can be found here. A list of recipients of the high-impact awards can be found here.

Introducing Covid Stimulus Watch

The furor over some of the companies receiving federal financial assistance through the Paycheck Protection Program represents one of the most remarkable outbursts of anti-corporate sentiment seen for quite some time. A corporation such as Shake Shack, which used to have a cult following, found itself vilified for getting a $10 million loan from a program the public assumed would be used to help mom-and-pop businesses rather than a fast casual chain that last year had revenues of more than half a billion dollars.

I’s not just a matter of big versus small. Journalists have pounced on the disclosures of the PPP loans—which have come from SEC filings rather than the federal government—to look for examples of problem companies on the list. One of the best examples, by the New York Times, found all kinds of corporate bad actors getting the loans.

A new website my colleagues and I at Good Jobs First have just launched will make it even easier to pursue this kind of research. Covid Stimulus Watch combines available recipient data for the PPP — as well as the Payroll Support Program, which has doled out billions to the airlines – with accountability data about the companies.

The accountability data comes in six categories. Four of those are derived from data in Violation Tracker: employment-related penalties (such as wage theft and workplace discrimination); government-contracting related penalties (mainly False Claims Act cases); environmental, healthcare and safety penalties; and consumer protection, financial misconduct and unfair competition penalties.

The fifth category, relating to taxes and subsidies, shows which large companies have paid very low federal income tax rates and which have received large amounts of pre-pandemic financial assistance from federal, state and local programs, such as those shown in Subsidy Tracker. The final category shows which recipient companies have high levels of executive compensation, especially in comparison to what they pay a typical worker.

The limited set of recipients currently listed in Covid Stimulus Watch already illustrate the accountability issues at stake. For example, the major airlines that are receiving billions of dollars in aid raise concerns in multiple categories. United has paid out over $40 million to settle employment discrimination lawsuits. American Airlines has paid over $70 million in safety violations. JetBlue and Delta had negative federal income tax rates in 2018. The ratio of the pay of American’s CEO to that of its median employee was 195 to 1.

Concerning data can also be seen about some of the smaller recipients. One PPP recipient, Veritone Inc., paid its CEO $18 million in compensation. Another PPP company, FuelCell Energy, received more than $170 million in federal grants prior to the pandemic.

The data in Covid Stimulus Watch will hopefully fuel even more debate over which corporations deserve to be rescued by taxpayers.

Corporate-Owned Nursing Homes and Covid-19

It was only a few days ago that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that nursing homes will be required to notify residents and their families when coronavirus cases have been discovered in a facility. This comes many weeks after the Life Care Center in Kirkland, Washington became an early Covid-19 hotspot and deaths started mounting at other nursing homes across the country.

Even before the pandemic began, conditions in the nation’s roughly 15,000 nursing homes, which house some 1.5 million residents, were far from ideal. As a Washington Post investigation recently found, about 40 percent of nursing homes with publicly reported cases of coronavirus — the list of which is far from complete, given varying transparency practices among the states — had been previously cited by government inspectors for violating regulations meant to control the spread of infections. This made them all the more susceptible to coronavirus.

The blame for that poor track record rests to a significant degree with the large corporations, including private equity firms, that control a substantial portion of the country’s nursing homes. While the Washington Post story did not identify the parent companies of the facilities with reported Covid-19 cases, the data in Violation Tracker shows the compliance problems at those corporations.

The nursing home chain with the largest amount of total penalties is Kindred Healthcare, which has had to pay out more than $350 million in fines and settlements. The bulk of that amount has come from cases in which Kindred and its subsidiaries were accused of violating the False Claims Act by submitting inaccurate or improper bills to Medicare and Medicaid. Another $40 million has come from wage and hour fines and settlements.

Kindred has also been fined more than $4 million for deficiencies in its operations. This includes more than $3 million it paid to settle a case brought by the Kentucky Attorney General over issues such as “untreated or delayed treatment of infections leading to sepsis.”

Golden Living Centers, a large chain owned by the private equity firm Fillmore Capital Partners, accounts for more than $200 million in fines and settlements. Golden Living is the current incarnation of Beverly Enterprises, which in the 1990s was the poster child of nursing home misconduct. In 2000 it paid $170 million to settle allegations that it defrauded Medicare by fabricating records to make it appear that staff members were devoting much more time to residents than they actually were.

Golden Living and Beverly have also paid more than $6 million in fines arising out of inspections of their facilities, including $1.5 million paid to the Arkansas Attorney General to resolve allegations of patient neglect.

Another chain with a problematic track record is Life Care Centers of America, operator of the ill-fated facility in Kirkland. The company has paid more than $147 million in fines and settlements, most of which came from a False Claims Act case in which it was accused of improperly billing Medicare for rehabilitation services.

The company has also paid more than $2 million in fines stemming from inspections, including $467,985 for nursing homes in Washington State. Life Care facilities appear numerous times on the Washington Post list of facilities with reported coronavirus cases.

Other chains with substantial penalty totals include Genesis HealthCare ($57 million), Ensign Group ($48 million) and National Healthcare Corp. ($28 million).

Among the many problems that have been brought into sharp relief by Covid-19 — and that will have to be addressed once we have gotten through the pandemic – is the sorry state of our nursing homes, too many of which seem to put profit ahead of safety for one of the most vulnerable parts of our population.

Another Crooked Bank?

For the past three years, Wells Fargo has been pilloried for having created millions of bogus accounts to extract unauthorized fees from its customers. Now it seems Wells may not have been the only financial institution to engage in this type of fraud.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, despite having been somewhat defanged by the Trump Administration, has just filed suit against Fifth Third Bank for similar behavior. Based in Cincinnati, Fifth Third is a large regional bank with branches in ten states and total assets of about $170 billion.

According to the CFPB’s complaint, the problem at Fifth Third arose when it, like Well Fargo, imposed overly aggressive cross-selling targets on its employees, causing them to create bogus accounts to meet those goals. These actions not only generated illicit fees, the complaint states, but also exposed customers to a higher risk of identity theft when, for example, online banking accounts were created without their knowledge. The issuance of unauthorized credit cards may have harmed customers’ credit scores.

The agency is asking a federal court to order Fifth Third to stop these practices and pay damages and penalties for its actions. The bank issued a press release denying the allegations and vowing to fight the lawsuit vigorously.

Although its “rap sheet” is a lot shorter than those of Wells Fargo and the other megabanks, Fifth Third has not been free from controversy. Violation Tracker’s tally on the company runs to more than $132 million in penalties.

One of the cases on the list was brought by the CFPB. In 2015 the agency announced that Fifth Third would pay $21.5 million to resolve two actions—one involving allegations of using racially discriminatory loan pricing and another involving deceptive marketing of credit card add-on products. The second case included allegations similar to those in the new case: telemarketers for the bank were alleged to have failed to tell cardholders that by agreeing to receive information about a product they would be enrolled and charged a fee.

Fifth Third’s largest past penalty was the $85 million it agreed to pay in 2015 to settle a case brought by the Justice Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development concerning the bank’s improper origination of federally insured residential mortgage loans during the housing bubble.

In 2013 Fifth Third paid $6.5 million to settle an SEC case concerning the improper accounting of commercial real estate loans in the midst of the financial crisis. It has also paid out more than $8 million in wage theft lawsuits.

If the allegations against Fifth Third hold up, bank regulators and federal prosecutors will also have to determine whether the scheme occurred at other financial institutions. Megabanks such as JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America have run up billions of dollars in fines and settlements for many different kinds of misconduct. We need to know whether the creation of sham accounts should be added to the list.

Justice Deferred at Wells Fargo

In finally resolving its investigation of Wells Fargo for a brazen scheme to bilk customers through the creation of millions of sham fee-generating accounts, the Trump/Barr Justice Department employed some tough language but administered what amounted to a slap on the wrist.

DOJ issued a press release quoting Deputy Assistant Attorney General Michael Granston as saying that the settlement “holds Wells Fargo accountable for tolerating fraudulent conduct that is remarkable both for its duration and scope.” The release was accompanied by a 16-page summary of the bank’s abuses, including the adoption of “onerous sales goals and accompanying management pressure [that] led thousands of its employees to engage in: (1) unlawful conduct to attain sales through fraud, identity theft, and the falsification of bank records, and (2) unethical practices to sell products of no or low value to the customer, while believing that the customer did not actually need the account and was not going to use the account.”

The document states that senior Wells executives were well aware of the unlawful behavior yet continued to ratchet up the sales pressure on employees.

This recitation echoes the content of a 100-page notice issued earlier by Wells’ primary regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. While the OCC imposed substantial financial penalties against several former executives of the bank, DOJ has not charged any individuals.

Justice imposed a $3 billion monetary penalty on Wells, which resolves criminal issues such as false bank records and identity theft as well as civil issues under the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act and securities violations that may be brought by the SEC. That penalty is not insignificant but it will not be too much of a burden for a bank whose profits last year exceeded $19 billion.

Moreover, the impact of the criminal portion of the case was diminished by the inclusion of a deferred prosecution agreement rather than the filing of any actual charges. This overused gimmick (like its evil twin, the non-prosecution agreement) allows DOJ to give the impression it is being tough with corporate bad actors while actually failing to do so.

In its press release on the Wells case, DOJ tries to justify the use of the DPA by noting factors such as the bank’s cooperation with the investigation. Yet it also cites “prior settlements in a series of regulatory and civil actions.”

How are the bank’s prior bad acts, which according to Violation Tracker have resulted in more than $17 billion in penalties, an argument for leniency? If anything, they militate against the use of DPA, which was originally meant to provide an incentive for a company caught up in a single case of misconduct to return to the straight and narrow.

Wells Fargo, in fact, was the recipient, via its acquisition Wachovia, of a previous DPA in 2010 for anti-money-laundering deficiencies as well as a 2011 non-prosecution agreement in connection with municipal bond bid-rigging. Those deals do not appear to have much of a beneficial effect on the ethical climate at the bank.

Allowing Wells to once again evade true criminal responsibility is sending the wrong signal to a corporation whose conduct was so pernicious, both in cheating its customers and in coercing lower-level employees to participate in the massive fraud.

Behavior like this calls out for tougher penalties. In 2018 the Federal Reserve took a step in that direction by barring Wells from growing any larger until it cleaned up its business practices. The agency also announced that the bank had been pressured to replace four members of its board of directors.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department continues to rely on prosecutorial approaches that have done little to stem the ongoing wave of corporate criminality.

Bloomberg’s Wage Theft Problem

Michael Bloomberg was pummeled during the Democratic debate in Las Vegas over the treatment of women at his media and data company. Yet that is not the only blemish on the employment record of Bloomberg L.P. The company also has a serious problem with wage theft.

Violation Tracker lists a total of $70 million in penalties paid by Bloomberg for wage and hour violations, putting it in 32^nd place among large corporations. Yet many of the companies higher on the list – such as Walmart, FedEx, and United Parcel Service – employ far more people than the roughly 20,000 at Bloomberg.

The bulk of Bloomberg’s penalty total comes from a 2018 collective action lawsuit in which it agreed to pay $54.5 million to resolve allegations that the company violated the federal Fair Labor Standards Act and state law in New York and California by failing to pay overtime to employees responsible for assisting customers using the proprietary software on Bloomberg financial data terminals.

The 2014 complaint in the case alleged that the employees were required to be at their desks before their shifts began, were required to use parts of their lunch hour to finish requests, and were required to work past the end of their shifts to finish jobs – all of which could cause them to work more than the 40 hours for which they were paid. Yet they received no additional compensation for the extra time, which the complaint said should have been paid at time-and-a-half.

For the next few years, Bloomberg’s lawyers fought the case both on substantive and procedural grounds, but they lost in their effort to prevent the certification of a class by the court. Whereas most employers who experience that setback agree to settle, Bloomberg wanted its day in court. The trial finally began in April 2018. After about a week of proceedings, the company apparently did not like the way things were going and entered settlement talks with the plaintiffs. A deal soon followed.

What makes the company’s aggressive posture in this case surprising is that it had previously settled four other wage and hour lawsuits for amounts ranging from $346,000 to $5.5 million.

Bloomberg’s wage theft litigation troubles expanded after the company had been cited twice for wage and hour violations by the U.S. Labor Department, paying a fine of $522,683 in 2011 and $547,683 in 2013.

In addition to all these cases, Bloomberg recently agreed to pay $3 million to settle another overtime lawsuit involving call center workers (the case is not yet in Violation Tracker).

Bloomberg is not the only tech company to have run afoul of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Google’s parent Alphabet, Intel, Apple, Adobe Systems, Microsoft, and Oracle are also high on the list of those companies that have paid the most in wage theft settlements and fines.

Yet Bloomberg LP is the only one on the list whose founder, majority owner and CEO is seeking to be the presidential nominee of a political party deeply concerned about the treatment of workers.

Getting Tough on Corporate Killing

The lead story on the front page of a recent edition of the Wall Street Journal was about the former chief executive of a Brazilian mining company not widely known in the United States. The Journal’s editors probably realized their readers would be shaken by the news that Fabio Schvartsman has been charged with homicide in the deaths of 270 people in a mining dam collapse last year.

The decision by prosecutors in the state of Minas Gerais to bring such charges against Schvartsman as well as other former executives at Vale SA shows the depth of anger in Brazil at the giant iron ore company over the accident in which a torrent of waste swept away people, submerged houses and created a large toxic wasteland (photo).

Vale and a German consulting company, five of whose officials were also hit with homicide charges, are alleged to have long known about a critical safety flaw in the tailings dam but failed to act.

Although Brazil does not have a death penalty or life sentences for civilian offenses, the filing of homicide charges against corporate executives is an aggressive measure that has rarely been applied in that country or anywhere else.

There are more precedents when it comes to corporate manslaughter, which is the idea that a business entity can be prosecuted for causing the death of employees or other persons. For example, in 2007 the United Kingdom enacted the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act, though that law has not been enforced as rigorously as many advocates had hoped.

In the United States there is no such federal statute, though the principle of corporate criminal liability is well-established, and numerous companies have faced criminal charges, though they frequently end with deferred prosecution or non-prosecution agreements.

The Violation Tracker database has more than 1,600 criminal cases (compared to 395,000 civil matters). Many of these are financial in nature or involve violations of environmental laws such as the Clean Water Act that are deemed negligent or deliberate but usually don’t involve loss of life.

A much smaller number involve corporate killing, including notorious cases such as BP’s role in the Deepwater Horizon disaster or the Upper Big Branch disaster at a coal mine owned by Massey Energy.

In these matters, however, the corporations, as in civil cases, mainly paid financial penalties and their executives faced no personal liability. One exception was former Massey CEO Don Blankenship, who was convicted of conspiring to violate federal mine safety standards and was sentenced to a year in prison. Otherwise, the Justice Department has shown little interest in prosecuting corporate executives for environmental or workplace fatalities.

There has been a bit more of such activity at the local level, especially on the part of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. It has brought criminal charges against both companies and individuals in connection with workplace and other accidents. For example, in November 2019 a building owner, a plumber and a contractor were convicted of manslaughter by causing a 2015 explosion resulting from unauthorized natural-gas connections installed in a rental building.

Three years earlier, the Manhattan DA won a conviction against a construction supervisor accused of ignoring warnings about unsafe conditions on a building site that resulted in a fatal accident.

The approach of the Manhattan DA and the prosecutors in Brazil points to a promising way forward in the handling of corporate misconduct that results in serious harm or death. If they know they may end up behind bars for a long time, corporate executives and managers may become more serious about their responsibility to abide by health and safety laws.

The Controversial Corporations Exploiting Citizens United

It has now been exactly ten years since the U.S. Supreme Court opened the floodgates for special-interest political advertising in its Citizens United ruling. To mark the occasion, the Center for Responsive Politics has published an excellent report detailing how political spending has changed over the last decade.

One significant finding is that, although Citizens United overturned the prohibition on independent political expenditures by corporations, most companies have not taken advantage of that new right directly. The biggest surges in spending have come from wealthy individuals and from Super PACs.

This is not to say that corporations have stayed on the sidelines. CRP notes that they are funneling much of their spending through trade associations and dark money groups that do not disclose their donors.

To emphasize its point about the limited role of corporations in independent expenditures, the CRP report notes that only 36 companies in the S&P 500 have contributed $25,000 or more to Super PACs since 2012. The report notes that the biggest of these spenders are oil and gas companies but otherwise does not identify them.

Karl Evers-Hillstrom, the author of the report, agreed to share the full list with me, so I could learn more about which corporations are bucking the trend and getting more directly involved with political spending.

Seven of the 36 are those oil and gas companies, including giant producers such as Chevron and ConocoPhillips as well as the big fracking player Devon Energy. The utility industry accounts for eight of the 36 and includes some of the largest contributors to air pollution and carbon emissions: American Electric Power, Duke Energy, Exelon and Southern Companies.

Only three other industries account for more than one of the corporations on the list: insurance (Anthem, Centene and MetLife), casinos (Wynn Resorts and MGM Resorts International) and telecommunications (AT&T and Charter Communications).

The remainder consists of 14 corporations from different industries such as pharmaceuticals (Merck), tobacco (Altria), retail (Walmart), banking (BB&T, now part of Truist Financial) and miscellaneous manufacturing (3M).

The list thus includes some of the most controversial companies from many of the most controversial industries. Among the 36 are some firms that were involved in contentious mergers (e.g. AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner) and policy issues (Anthem and Centene are big players in healthcare). After fighting for years over federal regulation of tobacco, Altria has moved into the contested business of vaping. Walmart was embroiled in a foreign bribery investigation.

One thing that characterizes nearly all the companies on the list is the fact that they have been implicated in significant compliance breaches. I checked the whole list against the data in Violation Tracker and found that the 36 firms account for more than $29 billion in fines and settlements.

The biggest penalty totals belong to Occidental Petroleum ($5.4 billion), American Electric Power ($4.8 billion), Merck ($3.3 billion) and Walmart ($2 billion). There are six other companies with totals of $1 billion or more. The average penalty for the 36 companies is $844 million.

What all this suggests is that, while most companies are not making full use of Citizens United, corporations that are engaged in controversial activities and have serious compliance problems can take advantage of the ruling and employ their financial resources to try to manipulate public policy in their favor. The threat to democracy thus remains.

U.S. Prosecutors and Foreign Corporations

Federal prosecutors recently announced that telecommunications giant Ericsson will pay more than $1 billion to resolve allegations that it conspired to make illegal payments to win contracts in five countries. The settlement included a $520 million criminal penalty imposed by the Justice Department and a $540 million civil payment to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

This was the latest in a long series of cases brought under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the 1977 law that emerged out of the Watergate-era revelations about improper overseas payments by U.S. corporations. But what the case against Sweden’s Ericsson highlights is the extent to which the law is being applied to foreign corporations as well as domestic ones.

In fact, companies based outside the United States increasingly appear to be the primary targets of prosecutors. In the period since the Trump Administration took office, foreign corporations have paid about $4 billion in FCPA penalties to DOJ and the SEC—more than seven times the sum paid by domestic firms. Apart from the Ericsson settlement, the largest combined penalties have been paid by a Russian company ($831 million by Mobile TeleSystems PJSC) and another Swedish one ($731 million by Telia).

By contrast, U.S.-based firms have gotten off with much lighter financial punishment. The only domestic company paying more than $100 million was Walmart, though its long-delayed $281 million penalty was well below what had been expected.

The tougher treatment of foreign companies can also be seen in the prosecution of price-fixing. Violation Tracker shows that during the Trump Administration foreign companies have paid more than $723 million to DOJ in criminal penalties, whereas domestic firms have been penalized only $44 million. There were seven fines of $50 million or more among the foreign companies; none among those based in the United States.

This tendency toward imposing heavier penalties on foreign companies is not unique to the Trump years. During the Obama Administration, seven of the ten largest FCPA settlements involved foreign corporations, as did nine of the ten largest price-fixing cases.

There is no evidence to suggest that foreign companies are more prone to law-breaking and thus account for more of the penalties. When it comes to offenses that are more purely domestic in nature – such as environmental, consumer protection and employment violations – U.S.-based companies more than hold their own.

The question is whether the federal government is using those portions of its enforcement powers that impact more heavily on international trade to put an added burden on the foreign competitors of U.S. companies. Perhaps this is an indirect form of protectionism.

Personally, I have no problem with the prosecution of foreign corporations that are engaged in misconduct, as long as domestic companies doing the same thing are not being let off the hook.