Violation Tracker

The 2023 Corporate Rap Sheet

The splashiest corporate crime prosecutions in 2023 came in the crypto sector. Binance pleaded guilty to charges of violating anti-money-laundering regulations and paid over $4 billion in criminal and civil penalties; its founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao was also charged personally and admitted guilt. The Justice Department won a conviction on fraud and conspiracy charges of crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried in connection with the collapse of his FTX exchange.

Otherwise, the DOJ has not had many blockbuster cases this year, and many of its bigger successes have involved foreign-based corporate defendants. Among the latter are a $1.4 billion settlement with the Swiss bank UBS in a toxic securities case that originated during the financial crisis a decade ago and a $629 million settlement with British American Tobacco involving a scheme to evade economic sanctions against doing business with North Korea.

While major convictions and settlements lag, DOJ has stepped up its dubious policy of corporate leniency. This includes frequent use of non-prosecution and deferred prosecution agreements under which companies are allowed to sidestep criminal pleas by agreeing to pay monetary penalties and promising to change their behavior—promises that are often broken.

During this year, DOJ has offered companies NPAs and DPAs at least 17 times. Among these are the British American Tobacco case cited above, a price-fixing case against Teva Pharmaceuticals, and a foreign bribery case against the chemical company Albemarle. A DPA was also used by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to resolve a case against a construction company called Skinner Tank on charges of willfully ignoring safety regulations and creating conditions that led to the death of a worker.

DOJ is also making increasing use of another form of leniency known as a declination. Companies that self-report illegal behavior that occurred under their roof are given a guarantee they will not be prosecuted and are allowed to pay a reduced fine. A DOJ webpage lists three declinations for this year, but a report by Public Citizen suggests that the department may be agreeing to keep some of these deals confidential.

Among most other federal agencies, this year has seen only a sprinkling of large case resolutions against major companies. For example, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security fined Seagate Technology $300 million for export control violations in its sale of disk drives to China’s Huawei Technologies. The Federal Reserve fined Deutsche Bank $186 million for failing to comply with previous consent orders involving sanctions compliance and anti-money-laundering practices.

Although most of its penalties are below $100 million, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has brought a steady stream of cases against financial predators. These include a $90 million penalty against Bank of America for imposing unfair overdraft fees, withholding reward bonuses explicitly promised to credit card customers, and misappropriating sensitive personal information to open accounts without customer knowledge or authorization.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has kept up its case volume, but the number of large resolutions in 2023 has been down from the previous year. And a larger portion of those major cases involve civil add-ons to criminal bribery cases brought by the Justice Department under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. There are also signs that the SEC is joining the leniency bandwagon. Recently, the agency waived a $40 million penalty against the drug company Mallinckrodt in a case related to its failure to disclose loss contingencies linked to an investigation of its Medicaid billing practices.

The Federal Trade Commission has also tended toward smaller settlements this year, though that agency handles many matters—including merger reviews—that may not involve monetary penalties. The biggest fine it imposed this year was $25 million in a case against Amazon.com for violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act Rule.

The Environmental Protection Agency has held steady in 2023. Its largest settlement has been a $242 million deal with BP in which the oil giant paid a $40 million penalty and agreed to spend $197 million on emission control upgrades at its Whiting refinery in Indiana.

Major cases have been down at the state level. There have been about two dozen resolutions involving penalties of $50 million or more, compared to the previous year’s total of 50, which included numerous opioid-related settlements. This year there has been one such settlement involving a $1.4 billion deal with supermarket chain Kroger.

Year to year changes do not tell the whole story, yet it is discouraging to see a drop-off in successful major enforcement actions. Let’s hope that in 2024 both federal and state regulators and prosecutors find the means to step up the pressure on rogue corporations.

Note: Details on the cases cited above and many more are in Violation Tracker.

Getting Tougher on Product Safety

For most of its history, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has not been the most aggressive federal regulator. Created in 1972, the agency has depended primarily on voluntary recalls of dangerous products by manufacturers. Its budget is below $200 million and its staff numbers around 500, both tiny by DC standards.

While the CPSC has the ability to use monetary penalties when companies fail to disclose hazards, it is relatively restrained in its use of that power. As shown in Violation Tracker, the agency has imposed a total of $397 million in fines against companies since 2000. More than half of that total has come since the Biden Administration took office. By comparison, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which started operating in 2011, has racked up more than $17 billion in fines and settlements.

For all these reasons, it is significant that the CPSC and the Justice Department recently announced that a federal jury in Los Angeles had returned a guilty verdict in the first-ever criminal prosecution brought against corporate executives under the Consumer Product Safety Act.

The defendants in the case were the chief administrative officer and the chief executive officer of Gree USA, Inc., a subsidiary of the Chinese-owned Hong Kong Gree Electric Appliances Sales Co., Ltd. The two men were charged with deliberately withholding information about defective dehumidifiers that could catch fire and selling these units with false certification marks that the products met applicable safety standards. They were convicted of conspiracy to defraud the CPSC and failure to meet reporting requirements, though they were acquitted of wire fraud.

Gree itself has also been targeted by the CPSC. The company has paid more in fines to the CPSC than any other company over the past two decades. That includes a $91 million penalty that was by far the largest single fine brought by the agency during this period. It was also the first criminal enforcement action under the Consumer Product Safety Act.

The impact of that was softened by the decision of the Justice Department to offer Gree a leniency deal in the form of a deferred prosecution agreement by which the company was able to avoid pleading guilty to the charges.

On the other hand, DOJ and CPSC took the bold step of going after the two Gree officials individually. It took four years from the time the two men were indicted, but their conviction sends a powerful message to executives that they can be held personally responsible for brazen disregard of product risks. The Gree executives are scheduled to be sentenced next March and could receive up to five years in prison.

The debate over how to deal with corporate crime is often framed as a choice between penalizing the company and prosecuting executives. The Gree case shows the value of using both approaches at the same time. That makes it more likely the message will get through to everyone in a rogue company that it has to change its practices in a fundamental way.

The CFPB Fights On

The Washington Post recently published a long examination of the obstacles facing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in its effort to rein in payday lenders which prey on low-income families. The leading companies in the industry have managed to block various investigations of their practices.

The agency’s difficulties mainly stem from a lawsuit brought by financial industry groups challenging the way in which the CFPB is funded. It is based on disingenuous arguments about the separation of power between the executive branch and Congress. The case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments last month but has not yet issued a ruling.

The good news is that the CFPB, which is no stranger to opposition from powerful corporate and Congressional foes, is not backing down. While the payday lending cases may be stalled, the agency is aggressively targeting other bad actors.

Last month, the CFPB fined the credit reporting giant TransUnion $23 million for violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act by failing to ensure the accuracy of the information it supplies to landlords for screening of tenant applications. Last week, the agency fined Citibank over $25 million for intentionally discriminating against Armenian Americans in reviewing credit card applications and then lying to those applicants about the reason for the denial.

In its latest action, the CFPB goes after the online lender Enova International Inc. for what the agency calls “widespread illegal conduct including withdrawing funds from customers’ bank accounts without their permission, making deceptive statements about loans, and cancelling loan extensions.”

This is not the first time the CFPB has targeted Enova. In 2019 it fined the company $3.2 million for many of the same practices. That penalty apparently did not get Enova to change its ways. The CFPB found that more than 100,000 customers have been subjected to abuses during the past four years.

To its credit, the CFPB is not just issuing another cease-and-desist order and imposing a larger fine ($15 million) this time around. It is also restricting some of Enova’s business and putting a crimp in the wallets of the company’s top managers.

Specifically, the CFPB is banning Enova for a period of seven years from offering or providing closed-end consumer loans that must be substantially repaid within 45 days. It is also requiring the company to reform its executive pay practices so that compensation is determined in part by compliance with federal consumer financial law.

This approach of restricting a rogue corporation’s business is potentially more effective than simply upping the fine. The same goes for making top executives personally feel some financial pain as a result of their failure to end the misconduct.

In its dozen years of existence, the CFPB has an impressive track record of policing misconduct in the financial services sector. As shown in Violation Tracker, it has imposed more than $17 billion in penalties against miscreants large and small. Let’s hope it is able to go on performing this essential mission.

Banking on Stereotypes

There are about half a million people in the United States with Armenian surnames. Managers at Citigroup apparently decided that all of them are criminals and went to great lengths to deny them credit cards.

That accusation is the basis of a $25 million penalty just imposed on Citi by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The agency alleges that supervisors at the bank ordered employees to discriminate against credit applicants deemed to be of Armenian origin based on the spelling of their family name—especially those living in and around Glendale, California, home to the country’s largest concentration of Armenian-Americans. To hide the blacklisting, applicants were given bogus reasons when their applications were denied.

Individual Armenian-Americans have been involved in organized crime. Earlier this year, a reputed Armenian mafia figure in the Los Angeles area was sentenced to 40 years in prison in connection with a scheme to fraudulently claim more than $1 billion in refundable renewable fuel tax credits.

Yet the existence of mobsters who belong to a particular ethnic group is hardly a justifiable basis for discriminating against everyone who shares that national origin. Citi’s alleged practices constituted a textbook violation of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.

The CFPB enforcement action is a reminder that not all corporate discriminatory practices involve hiring, pay levels, promotion and other conditions of employment. Companies can also discriminate against customers based on race, gender, national origin, etc. In Violation Tracker we document more than 500 such cases dating back to 2000.

Many of these involve financial institutions accused of unfair treatment of African-American and Latino borrowers. Some of these are holdovers of the longstanding practice of redlining, in which credit is denied to those living in communities with demographic characteristics banks regard as undesirable. Earlier this year, Park National Bank paid $9 million to settle Justice Department allegations it redlined parts of Columbus, Ohio.

There have also been some cases involving other minorities. In 2016 Toyota Motor Credit was fined $21.9 million by CFPB for charging higher interest rates to Asian and Pacific Islander borrowers (as well as African-Americans) on automobile loans.

The cases I found that were closest to Citi matter were actions involving discrimination against Arab-Americans in the wake of 9/11. The most relevant was a 2006 settlement reached by the Massachusetts Attorney General and Bank of America to resolve allegations that Fleet Bank, which BofA acquired in 2004, had improperly closed the accounts of customers with Arabic names, supposedly to guard against the channeling of funds to terrorist groups.

It is ironic to see the likes BofA and Citi portraying themselves as so concerned about potential bad actors that they stereotype entire ethnic groups. If any group deserves to be so stereotyped it is the big banks themselves.

BofA is by far the most penalized company in the United States, with over $87 billion in cumulative fines and settlements since 2000. Citi ranks sixth with nearly $27 billion in penalties. They need to clean up their own houses rather than making assumptions about the behavior of others.

The Missing Crackdown

Joe Biden came to office vowing to get tough on corporate abuses, reversing the soft-on-white-collar-crime approach of his predecessor. Biden went on making those promises, and they were echoed by Attorney General Garland and other Justice Department officials.

That crackdown, however, has not materialized. A new report from Public Citizen shows that the Justice Department concluded only 110 corporate criminal prosecutions in 2022—lower than in any year of the Trump Administration. In fact, it was the smallest number since 1994.

In addition to the decline in overall cases, Public Citizen points out a drop in the number of those cases in which the defendant company received a leniency deal. These are arrangements known as non-prosecution and deferred prosecution agreements in which a firm can avoid a guilty plea by paying a penalty and promising to change its behavior.

Those pledges are frequently broken, and the companies are charged again. Instead of throwing the book at these recidivists, DOJ often offers them a new leniency agreement, making the whole process a farce.

As Public Citizen notes, a decline in leniency agreements would be a good thing if it went along with an increase in the overall volume of prosecutions. Instead of replacing leniency agreements with conventional cases, the DOJ statistics suggest that the agency is simply choosing not to prosecute at all in many instances.

Public Citizen says DOJ may be making greater use of a process called declination, which is essentially a form of super-leniency in which no charges are brought. Some of these deals are made public, but the best corporate defense lawyers can negotiate declinations that are kept secret.

The analysis done by Public Citizen focuses on criminal cases. I decided to check comparable civil cases brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission. According to data collected in Violation Tracker, the SEC collected $1.4 billion in penalties from companies in 2021. This was down from the totals in the final two years of the Trump Administration. In 2022 the SEC’s total jumped to $4.4 billion, thanks in large part to a single case involving a $1 billion settlement with the German insurance company Allianz.

This year the SEC total through mid-October is $1.5 billion. Unless the agency announces some very large cases in the next nine weeks, its 2023 total will also fall behind the final Trump years.

While case and penalty totals do not tell the whole story, what we see in both the criminal and civil areas is something less than a major assault on corporate misconduct. There have been some laudable steps taken by other agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but both of those regulators have faced legal challenges to their enforcement powers. At the same time, the whole system of business regulation is threatened by Republican defunding efforts.

Overall, the Biden Administration has yet to show that it can overcome these obstacles and make good on the promises of a crackdown on rogue corporations.

Whose Advantage?

Progressive Democrats such as Bernie Sanders have long promoted Medicare for All as the solution to the country’s health insurance problems. Given the popularity of Medicare among the seniors it serves, extending the program to other age groups has a great deal of appeal.

The problem, though, is that Medicare is not a single program. It is an assortment of coverage options that can be bewildering to those turning 65 and to participants during the open enrollment period each year when they must decide whether to stick with their current plan or jump to another. The 2024 open enrollment period began on October 15th and ends December 7th.

Seniors are currently being bombarded with coverage offers, not from the federal government, which oversees Medicare, but from the private insurance companies which have gained a significant foothold in a nominally public program.

That involvement may take the form of supplemental coverage for the 20 percent of medical costs Medicare does not cover. Prescription drugs coverage, which was not part of traditional Medicare, was added in 2006 through a system that requires most participants to purchase plans from private insurers.

Most problematic is the coverage designated as Medicare Part C, which is more commonly known as Medicare Advantage (MA). Whereas traditional Medicare operates much like the fee-for-service health insurance many Americans receive through their employer, MA is more akin to a health maintenance organization or HMO. Instead of paying doctors and others for providing service, MA gives plan providers, which are usually commercial insurers, a lump sum for each beneficiary. They are then responsible for managing patient care. Around half of Medicare participants are in MA plans.

MA providers claim that they can offer improved care, including services such as dental and vision which are not included in traditional Medicare. They also depict themselves as the solution to runaway medical costs. To the extent this is true, the MA providers achieve these results through many of the same ruthless practices that gave HMOs and managed care a bad name starting in the 1990s.

That means erecting roadblocks to care by limiting beneficiaries’ choice of providers, requiring prior authorization for many procedures and refusing authorization at a high rate.

It turns out that MA also fails to deliver on the promise of reducing healthcare costs for the Medicare program. A recent report from Physicians for a National Health Program estimates that the way MA’s capitated system is structured causes taxpayers to overpay the plans at least $88 billion per year and perhaps as much as $140 billion.

Along with these technical reasons is old-fashioned fraud. The Justice Department recently announced that Cigna would be paying $172 million to settle allegations that it submitted “inaccurate and untruthful” diagnosis codes to the federal government to inflate risk adjustments and thus boost the MA payments it received.

Cigna is not alone. As shown in Violation Tracker, Sutter Health paid $90 million to resolve allegations of submitting inaccurate information about the health status of its MA beneficiaries in order to get its payments increased. It had previously paid $30 million for similar misconduct.

An analysis last year by the New York Times found that all but one of the top ten MA providers had been accused by the federal government of fraud or overbilling.

When we talk of Medicare for All, we need to be clear that means an extension and ideally an enhancement of traditional Medicare–not the false promise of Medicare Advantage.

Watching the ESG Watchmen

Investment advisors that adopt the label ESG present themselves as arbiters of corporate behavior. They claim to identify which companies are serious about environmental, social and governance goals and thus deserve to be included in high-minded portfolios.

But who watches the watchmen? Who determines when the ESG gatekeepers have gone astray? The answer turns out not to be Ron DeSantis and Republican Attorneys General who have been attacking what they see as wokeness in the business world. Instead, it is the traditional cop on the financial beat—the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The SEC recently brought charges against a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank for misleading investors by exaggerating the extent to which it actually applied ESG principles in its stock recommendations. DWS Investment Management Americas Inc. (DWS), according to the SEC, “failed to adequately implement certain provisions of its global ESG integration policy” and “failed to adopt and implement policies and procedures reasonably designed to ensure that its public statements about the ESG integrated products were accurate.”

DWS, which agreed to settle the charges by paying $25 million in penalties, was also accused of failing to develop an adequate program to make sure its mutual funds were not being used for money laundering. The accusations against DWS essentially came down to deception and negligence.

It is, of course, ironic that a firm whose mission is to monitor the behavior of other companies was found to have serious deficiencies in its own conduct. Yet the real lesson of the DWS case is that the E in ESG does not stand for “ethical.”

This becomes abundantly clear when we look at the track record of many ESG investment advisors as well as the companies that score well in ESG ratings. DWS stands out in this regard. Its parent Deutsche Bank is the ninth most heavily penalized parent company in Violation Tracker with nearly $20 billion in fines and settlements in the United States since 2000.

The bank has, for example, paid out enormous sums in multiple cases involving offenses such as manipulation of interest rate benchmarks, facilitation of fraudulent tax shelters, deception of investors in the sale of what turned out to be toxic securities, and violation of anti-money-laundering laws. The latter included a $425 million settlement with the New York Department of Financial Services of allegations its Moscow, London and New York offices participated in a mirror trading scheme that laundered $10 billion out of Russia.

Despite this record, Deutsche Bank scores pretty high in some ESG rankings. The same combination of heavy regulatory penalties and high ratings can be seen with other investment firms such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as well as companies in many other industries. Even fossil fuel culprits such as Chevron and Occidental Petroleum get relatively high ESG scores.

All this is further evidence that the real problem with much of the ESG movement is not that it goes too far, but rather that it is often used as a smokescreen to hide all manner of corporate misconduct by those claiming to promote virtue.

Corporations Are Not Saving the Planet After All

It used to be that you had to go to the websites of groups such as Greenpeace to learn how large corporations are failing to live up to their promises to help solve the climate crisis. Now that fact can be found on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

The business-friendly newspaper just published an article detailing the ways in which the decarbonization efforts of the world’s largest companies are fizzling out. A big part of the problem is that most companies never developed meaningful climate transition plans and instead relied on dubious carbon offsets instead. The Journal quotes the environmental non-profit CDP as saying that of the nearly 19,000 companies using its disclosure platform, fewer than 100 have credible plans.

Some companies don’t bother to develop any plans—or they keep them to themselves. The Journal cites data showing the percentages of larger publicly traded companies that do not disclose specific plans to meet long-term climate targets. Among those in the coal, oilfield services, and midstream oil sectors the portion is 100 percent. Among integrated oil companies, 93 percent fail to do so.

Big Oil’s detrimental role in dealing with the climate was highlighted in another recent Journal article. It’s well known that Exxon Mobil worked for years to downplay the harmful effects of greenhouse gas emissions. In 2006 the company finally acknowledged those dangers, but the Journal found that within the company the policy did not really change. The newspaper was given access to internal company documents that had been collected by the New York Attorney General but never made public.

These documents, the Journal says, show that Rex Tillerson, who had just taken over as CEO at the time, continued to work behind the scenes to play down the severity of climate change. Exxon executives and scientists were apparently encouraged to go on questioning the mainstream consensus on climate harm.

In other words, it appeared that Exxon, rather than fully abandoning its overt climate denialism, replaced it with a more low-key version while simultaneously reaping the benefits of greenwashing.

Apart from its malignant impact on the climate problem, the fossil fuel industry also continues to be a major source of conventional pollution. We are reminded of this fact by a new report from the Center for American Progress which looks at the long-standing boondoggle surrounding the system by which the industry is allowed to drill on public lands and offshore.

Making extensive use of data from Violation Tracker, the report shows that the top 20 leasing companies are responsible for more than 2,000 environmental violations in their overall operations over the past two decades. Exxon Mobil leads the list with 442 such penalties, while BP has paid out the most—over $30 billion—largely due to its role in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

CAP’s report recommends that proposed new standards issued by the federal Bureau of Land Management for companies seeking leases be strengthened to include language specifying what defines a bad actor, adding: “Such bad actors should not be eligible for new leases or permits until they have resolved all outstanding issues and demonstrated that they are capable of changing their practices. Further, leases of companies found not to be a qualified or responsible lessee should be subject to cancellation.”

Tougher standards such as these will help to get the message through to the fossil fuel giants that they need to change their ways once and for all.

Corporations and National Security

Most of the cases handled by the Justice Department’s National Security Division involve individuals accused of providing support to foreign terrorist organizations, or more recently, domestic far-right extremists linked to groups such as the Proud Boys.

Yet the division has another mission: prosecuting corporations which violate international economic sanctions or which fail to prevent sensitive technology from being transferred to unfriendly foreign countries. It is beefing up this work, especially the latter part.

The division just appointed its first Chief Counsel for Corporate Enforcement and Deputy Counsel for Corporate Enforcement. In making the announcement, Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen suggested that a tougher stance is being taken: “We have watched with concern as investigations of corporate misconduct increasingly reveal violations of laws that protect the United States. Enforcing the laws that deny our adversaries the benefits of America’s innovation economy and protect technologies that will define the future is core to the National Security Division’s mission.” Olsen is in effect saying that some corporations are national security risks—or perhaps more accurately, national economic security risks.

These appointments are consistent with the announcement earlier this year that the National Security Division was joining with the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) and other agencies to form the Disruptive Technology Task Force. Its mission is “to target illicit actors, strengthen supply chains and protect critical technological assets from being acquired or used by nation-state adversaries.”

Until now, the division’s corporate prosecutions have been limited. In Violation Tracker we document 17 cases that have been brought against companies over the past decade. Most of these are foreign-based companies. For example, in in 2017 a penalty of $430 million was imposed on the Chinese telecommunications company ZTE for illegally shipping U.S.-origin technology items to Iran.

BIS, which brings civil rather than criminal actions, has a much bigger caseload. Violation Tracker documents over 600 export control cases brought by the agency since 2000. It has also gone after foreign companies such as ZTE but its case list includes numerous domestic companies, including Boeing, General Electric and Northrop Grumman. Earlier this year, it penalized Seagate Technology LLC $300 million for illegal sales of computer disk drives to China’s Huawei Technologies. (Seagate’s parent is technically incorporated in Ireland for tax reasons, but its operational headquarters are in California and it is effectively an American company.)

A focus on domestic companies is also seen in the caseload of another federal export control agency: the State Department Directorate of Defense Trade Controls. Violation Tracker shows there have been around four dozen cases brought against companies by DDTC since 2000, nearly all of them U.S.-based. RTX Corporation (formerly Raytheon Technologies) and its subsidiaries account for the largest share of the penalties.

Given the willingness of U.S.-based transnationals to share technology with customers in countries such as China over the past few decades, the DOJ’s new focus on economic security may be too late to undo much of the damage. Yet if prosecutors are going to address the problem nonetheless, they should follow the lead of other agencies and go after domestic as well as foreign culprits.

The Other Wage Theft

When we hear references to wage theft, there is a tendency to think of low-paid workers being cheated by fly-by-night employers. That is only part of the story.

Wage and hour violations affecting better-paid white-collar workers are also common, and the employers involved are often household names. Their abuses typically consist of practices such as denying overtime pay to low-level supervisors by erroneously classifying them as managers.

The federal law governing workplace pay practices, the Fair Labor Standards Act, provides exemptions for bona fide executive, administrative and professional employees, who are typically paid a salary. Yet in order for the exemption to apply, the person must be paid above a certain level.

Unfortunately, that threshold has not been adequately updated and is today only $35,000 annually. As a result, many first-line supervisors and similar employees with quite modest salaries end up working many extra hours without additional compensation.

A new proposal from the U.S. Labor Department would alleviate the situation by raising the threshold to about $55,000 a year. Yet this would not completely solve the problem.

Some employers will flout the new standard the way they did with the old one. In fact, the higher threshold will probably tempt even more companies to cheat. Along with the new threshold, the Labor Department needs to put more emphasis on enforcement, especially at larger corporations.

In 2018 I wrote a report called Grand Theft Paycheck that analyzed the prevalence of wage theft in big business by looking both at DOL enforcement actions and private collective action lawsuits brought on behalf of groups of workers. The latter accounted for most of the penalties collected from large corporations.

During the past five years I have continued to document wage theft cases for Violation Tracker, and the trend continues. Here are some of the significant settlements since 2018 involving white-collar and professional workers:

Humana agreed to pay $11 million to settle allegations that it improperly treated nurses as exempt from overtime.

Wells Fargo agreed to pay over $10 million to settle allegations that it failed to pay home mortgage consultants proper commissions and incentive payments.

CVS Health agreed to pay over $10 million to resolve a lawsuit alleging it did not properly compensate pharmacists for time spent on company-mandated training.

Computer Sciences Corporation agreed to pay over $9 million for failing to pay overtime to system administrators.

Pharmaceutical company Baxalta agreed to pay over $4 million for failing to pay overtime to technicians.

Santander Bank agreed to pay over $4 million to settle litigation alleging it did not pay proper overtime compensation to branch operations managers.

Facebook agreed to pay $1.65 million to resolve a lawsuit claiming it improperly classified its client solutions managers as exempt from overtime pay.

All these cases were brought by plaintiffs’ lawyers, who provide an important service (while collecting a portion of the proceeds). It would be preferable, however, to see the Labor Department pursue more of these cases as well as the ones involving small businesses.

Wage theft comes in multiple forms. Regulators should be investigating them all.