March 2024 Archives

Swiping Fees

For the past two decades, groups of merchants have been suing Mastercard and Visa for charging excessive credit card processing fees, also known as swipe fees. That effort has now paid off with a tentative class action settlement that will reduce the fees by an estimated $30 billion over the next five years.

This deal is on top of about $6 billion the companies previously agreed to pay in damages. Together, the cases represent one of the biggest business litigation settlements ever.

As large as the amounts are, they are not putting too much of a dent in the profitability of Mastercard and Visa, which together rake in about $100 billion a year from merchants and together enjoy about $30 billion in annual profits.

The issue of swipe fees has come up in connection with the proposed acquisition of Discover, the perennial also-ran of the credit card world, by Capital One. In its announcement of the deal, Capital One claimed it would enable Discover “to be more competitive with the largest payments networks and payments companies.” It is making similar arguments in its filings with regulators to gain approval for the purchase.

While Capital One may not have caused as much grief as Visa and Mastercard, its track record shows it cannot claim to be the savior of consumers and small businesses. In 2012, for example, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined the company $25 million and ordered it to refund $140 million to customers following an investigation of deceptive tactics used in marketing credit card add-on products.

Capital One has also paid out tens of millions of dollars in settlements in class action lawsuits alleging abuses such improperly raising credit card interest rates after promoting low rates and charging unfair overdraft and balance inquiry fees.

The largest penalties paid by Capital One have been in cases involving deficiencies in its anti-money-laundering practices. In 2018 it was fined $100 million by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for failing to file required suspicious activity reports.

In 2021 the bank was fined $290 million by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network for doing business with check-cashing services known to be linked to organized crime in New York and New Jersey.

Capital One may not have accumulated penalties to the same extent as larger banks such as Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Citigroup, but its total payouts have reached nearly $1 billion.

If it succeeds in buying Discover, it will acquire a company with $275 million in penalties of its own. Most of that comes from a 2012 case in which the CFPB fined Discover $14 million and ordered it to refund $200 million to customers said to have been subjected to deceptive marketing tactics regarding credit card add-on products. In other words, practices similar to those for which Capital One was penalized that year.

The solution to excessive swipe fees will come not from allowing another player with a questionable record to join Visa and Mastercard in dominating the payments market, but rather through antitrust and other regulatory action restricting the predatory practices of that market.

Mega-Scandals

Over the past quarter century, large corporations have paid hundreds of billions of dollars in fines and settlements for a wide range of misconduct. In Violation Tracker we document many thousands of these cases and place them in various categories. We have just added a new way of looking at the most egregious kinds of wrongdoing.

On the website we now identify clusters of major cases in which companies paid substantial penalties—from $25 million up to the billions—for practices that harmed large numbers of consumers, workers, investors or community members. We call these Mega-Scandals.

Chronologically, the first mega-scandal was the series of accounting and corruption scandals of the early 2000s at companies such as Enron, the high-flying energy trading company that went out of business—taking its auditor Arthur Andersen with it—when it turned out to be engaged in brazen accounting fraud.

Similar misconduct came to light at companies such as WorldCom, a telecommunications provider found to have inflated its assets by billions of dollars; Tyco International, a security systems firm whose CEO was convicted of misusing corporate funds to support a lavish personal lifestyle; and Adelphia Communications, whose principals were found guilty of looting the firm. One of the new mega-deal summary pages in Violation Tracker documents over $6 billion in penalties resulting from these cases.

The magnitude of the Enron era cases would be dwarfed by another mega-scandal which erupted later in the 2000s. It was the outgrowth of a period of financial deregulation that allowed Wall Street to create a slew of complex investment products backed by shaky home mortgages. When the housing market softened and many of those mortgages became delinquent, the value of residential mortgage-backed securities plunged. They came to be known as toxic securities.

The country avoided a complete financial collapse, but those toxic securities brought about significant legal and monetary consequences for the financial institutions held responsible for devising and marketing them. They found themselves the target of major lawsuits brought by the federal government, state governments, institutional investors and others. We estimate that the banks ended up paying more than $148 billion in fines and settlements, making this the most expensive of the mega-scandals.

The legal fallout from the financial crisis was also felt by the financial institutions that originated those shaky home mortgage loans behind the toxic securities. In some cases, they were part of the same banks that marketed the securities. Banks were sued both for luring low-income consumers into unsustainable mortgages and for misleading investors about those practices.

Far and away, the biggest payout in this category came from Bank of America, whose $53 billion total resulted from giant settlements with the U.S. Justice Department, state attorneys general, the loan guarantee agency Fannie Mae and others. JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo each racked up close to $9 billion in payouts. Overall, the mortgage abuse cases resulted in fines and settlements of more than $80 billion.

It was not long after the financial crisis that the next corporate mega-scandal burst onto the scene. It began on April 20, 2010 when an explosion occurred at the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig operated by BP in the Gulf of Mexico (photo). The accident killed 11 crew members and released a vast amount of oil into the gulf. It turned out to be the largest oil spill in history.

BP—along with the owner of the rig, Transocean, and Halliburton, which helped construct it—faced a wave of litigation alleging deficiencies in their actions before, during and after the accident. They ended up paying about $36 billion in settlements, with most of that coming from BP.

The pharmaceutical industry is responsible for several mega-scandals, the worst of which is the role drugmakers played in bringing about the opioid epidemic. Much of the blame has fallen on Purdue Pharma, which was relentless in promoting pain killers such as oxycodone, downplaying the risks of addiction even as overdose deaths soared. Purdue finally consented to a settlement in which it agreed to pay $8 billion and effectively go out of business, though the deal has been caught up in controversy over the effort of the Sackler family, which controlled the company, to shield itself from liability.

Other companies such as drug wholesalers and pharmacy chains have also faced major litigation over their alleged failure to question the enormous volume of prescriptions coming from dubious sources such as shady pain clinics known as pill mills. The Violation Tracker tally on the opioid mega-scandal estimates that total payouts have now surpassed $70 billion.

Among the other mega-scandals are:

The emissions cheating controversy centering on Volkswagen: $32 billion.
The wildfire liability controversy centering on PG&E: $18 billion.
The bogus bank account controversy centering on Wells Fargo: $8 billion.

More on these and other mega-scandals can be found on the Violation Tracker Summaries Page. Mega-scandals are also now included in the Offense Type dropdown on the Advanced Search page and thus can be combined with other variables.

Will Big Pharma Continue to Fleece Taxpayers?

Tensions are mounting between the Biden Administration, which wants to implement legislation passed in 2022 allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, and the pharmaceutical industry, which would like to nullify the law and maintain the highly profitable status quo.

Big Pharma has little support from the American public, which pays much more for its meds than residents of other countries. The industry is ultimately counting on being rescued by the business-friendly majority on the Supreme Court.

Being able to dictate prices to Medicare is not the only way drugmakers fleece government agencies and the public. In Violation Tracker we document more than 150 major cases of drug price cheating by large producers.

Some of these cases are old-fashioned price-fixing, in which supposedly competing producers conspire to set prices. Last year, for example, criminal charges were brought against Teva Pharmaceuticals and Glenmark Pharmaceuticals for scheming to fix prices of several generic drugs. Teva paid a $225 million criminal penalty and Glenmark paid $30 million. The companies were also ordered to divest their operations relating to the cholesterol drug pravastatin.

Generic producers are supposed to help reduce drug prices, but they often do the opposite. Along with price-fixing, they often engage in schemes called pay for delay. These are illegal deals in which they receive payments from producers of brand-name drugs whose patent protection is ending to look the other way as those producers use tricks to extend their exclusivity. Pay for delay arrangements are frequently challenged via class action lawsuits, and both brand-name and generic drugmakers have paid billions in settlements.

Earlier this year, for instance, Gilead Sciences agreed to pay over $246 million to settle litigation alleging it entered into an improper deal to delay the introduction of a generic version of its HIV medications. Pay for delay is apparently so profitable that nine-figure settlements have not put a dent in it.

Another form of cheating involves manipulation of the wholesale price levels drug companies are required to report to state Medicaid agencies and which are used in determining how much they receive for their products. This reporting is supposed to ensure that the prices being paid by Medicaid are not out of line with those charged to other parties.

Drugmakers have repeatedly been accused of reporting inflated prices to Medicaid, and have paid out large amounts in settlements. In 2016 Pfizer and its subsidiary Wyeth paid $784 million to resolve allegations that Wyeth knowingly reported to the government false and fraudulent prices on two of its proton pump inhibitor drugs.

Then there is the issue of rebates. Pharmaceutical companies often offer them to private-sector customers to promote their products, but they frequently fail to provide the same benefit to government health programs. Violation Tracker contains numerous cases in which drugmakers were accused shortchanging government agencies on rebates. In 2021 Bristol-Myers Squibb paid $75 million to settle one such case.

The Pharma giants have also driven up costs indirectly through practices such as paying kickbacks to healthcare providers to prescribe expensive medications and engaging in improper marketing to encourage off-label use of those over-priced meds.

There seems to be no end to the ways pharmaceutical companies pick the pockets of taxpayers and consumers. The Inflation Reduction Act could begin to tip the scales in the other direction—unless the courts decide to keep us at the mercy of the industry.

Eliminating the Late Fee Bonanza

A substantial number of working-class Americans have decided that the Biden Administration is not acting in their interest and is instead serving the elites. One area in which that notion most strongly conflicts with reality is the regulation of consumer financial services.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is an agency that has consistently stood up to giant banks, payday lenders and mortgage servicers. In its latest move, the CFPB just issued a rule limiting the late fees large credit card companies can charge to $8 a month.

That’s compared to the current norm of around $32, which generates an estimated $14 billion annual profit for the issuers. The CFPB estimates the cap will deprive banks of more than two-thirds of this bonanza, which has grown despite federal legislation passed in 2009 designed to ban excessive charges.

It is thus no surprise that the credit card industry is up in arms. Trade associations are trotting out fatuous claims that the lower fees will actually harm consumers while preparing lawsuits to challenge the cap.

Banks are unlikely to win much public support in their counter-offensive. That is because they have a long history of mistreating cardholders every way possible.

The CFPB knows this only too well. Over the past dozen years, the agency has brought a series of cases challenging credit card abuses and imposing hefty penalties against the culprits. Here are some examples:

In 2015 the CFPB fined Citibank $35 million and ordered it to provide an estimated $700 million in relief to consumers harmed by allegedly illegal practices related to credit card add-on products and services. Roughly seven million consumer accounts were said to be affected by deceptive marketing, billing, and administration of debt protection and credit monitoring products. The agency also said a Citibank subsidiary deceptively charged expedited payment fees to nearly 1.8 million consumer accounts during collection calls.

Three years later, the CFPB concluded that Citibank was violating the Truth in Lending Act by failing to reevaluate and reduce the annual percentage rates (APRs) for approximately 1.75 million consumer credit card accounts consistent with regulatory requirements, and by failing to have reasonable written policies and procedures to conduct the APR reevaluations consistent with regulation. Citi was ordered to provide $335 million in restitution.

In 2012 the CFPB and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation ordered Discover Bank to refund approximately $200 million to more than 3.5 million consumers and pay a $14 million civil money penalty after an investigation found the bank misled consumers into paying for various credit card add-on products.

That same year, the CFPB ordered three American Express subsidiaries to refund an estimated $85 million to approximately 250,000 customers for illegal card practices. This was the result of a multi-part federal investigation which, according to the agency, “found that at every stage of the consumer experience, from marketing to enrollment to payment to debt collection, American Express violated consumer protection laws.” American Express was also required to pay a penalty of $14 million to the CFPB.

Last year, the CFPB ordered Bank of America to pay $90 million in penalties for a variety of abusive practices, such as withholding reward bonuses explicitly promised to credit card customers.

Some of these practices may have been changed, but the industry, with its exorbitant interest rates, is far from a paragon of corporate virtue. The cap on late fees, if it survives court challenges, will help to tip the scales back in favor of customers. The only question is whether they will pay attention to who brought this about.