Putting Strings on Bank Mergers

The U.S. financial system has survived a decade without another meltdown like that caused by the proliferation of toxic securities in the late 2000s. The credit belongs to tougher regulation, not to a moral conversion on the part of the large banks. Those institutions still exhibit significant ethical deficits even as they grow larger.

That’s why new legislation on bank mergers being introduced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Illinois Rep. Chuy Garcia makes sense. The Bank Merger Review Modernization Act would require regulatory agencies to apply more rigorous standards when deciding whether to approve proposed deals.

Those standards would include a quantitative risk metric, consideration of the impact on market concentration for specific banking products, Community Reinvestment Act ratings and approval by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Those measures are all fine, but I would also suggest that regulators be required to consider the full track record of each party when it comes to compliance with a broad range of laws regulations.

I say this having compiled a large quantity of documentation of bank misconduct in my work on Violation Tracker. I am continuously amazed at the number and variety of cases in which banks have been involved as well as the eye-popping penalties they have paid to buy their way out of legal jeopardy.

The Violation Tracker penalty total for the financial services industry now stands at $305 billion (since 2000), and that number will increase by about $8 billion next week when we post an update that for the first time will include cases brought by the New York State Department of Financial Services and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.

Those agencies have brought several dozen major cases against large banks, especially foreign-based ones, for violations of international economic sanctions, money-laundering regulations and rules regarding the manipulation of foreign exchange markets.

Warren and Garcia express specific concern about the combination of SunTrust and BB&T, which are merging to form a new “Too Big to Fail” bank they are naming Truist.

There is good reason for the banks to shed their old identities. According to Violation Tracker, SunTrust has racked up more than $1.5 billion in penalties. These include a 2014 case in which the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the attorneys general of 49 states and the District of Columbia required the company to address mortgage servicing misconduct by providing $500 million in loss-mitigation relief to underwater borrowers. It also required SunTrust to pay $40 million to approximately 48,000 consumers who lost their homes to foreclosure. At the same time, SunTrust had to pay $418 million to resolve a related case brought by the Justice Department for originating and underwriting loans that violated its obligations as a participant in the Federal Housing Administration insurance program.

As if that was not enough, SunTrust had to pay another $320 million as part of the resolution of a DOJ criminal case alleging that it misled numerous mortgage servicing customers who sought mortgage relief through the federal Home Affordable Modification Program.

BB&T has paid more than $130 million in penalties, most of which came from a 2016 case in which it agreed to pay $83 million to the Justice Department to resolve allegations that it violated the False Claims Act by knowingly originating and underwriting mortgage loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration that did not meet applicable requirements.

Why, one might ask, should corporations with such blemished records be allowed to merge and become the country’s sixth largest bank, whose combined resources will allow it to capture additional market share? It might be worth exploring whether, in addition to the kind of safeguards being proposed by Warren and Garcia, banks with a substantial record of misconduct could be barred from participating in mergers, or at least be required to take additional steps to make amends to the customers and communities they have harmed.

Another Type of Quid Pro Quo

As the political news is dominated by discussion of quid pro quo and bribery, there has been another ongoing series of allegations about improper payments for things of value. The other quid pro quo relates to the pharmaceutical industry, which has been the subject of a seemingly never-ending scandals about financial inducements given to healthcare professionals.

The most significant recent case involves a company called Avanir Pharmaceuticals, which had to pay more than $115 million to resolve allegations that it paid kickbacks to physicians to get them to prescribe its drug Nuedexta for uses not approved as safe by the Food and Drug Administration.

Among those uses were the treatment of behaviors associated with dementia among residents of long-term care facilities. Nuedexta was tested and approved for patients exhibiting what is known as pseudobulbar affect (PBA) — involuntary, sudden, and frequent episodes of laughing or crying that occur secondary to a neurologic disease or brain injury.

The case against Avanir included allegations that physicians receiving its payments ended up putting large numbers of patients on Nuedexta who showed no symptoms of PBA, exposing them to unknown risks.

The Justice Department regarded Avanir’s behavior to be serious enough to warrant criminal charges, but like in so many other cases, the company was offered a deferred prosecution agreement that allowed it to buy its way out of full legal jeopardy by paying criminal penalties of nearly $13 million. The company agreed to cooperate in the prosecution of several individuals who received the kickbacks and whose liability may end up being more than financial in nature.

In addition to the criminal matter, Avanir agreed to pay $103 million to settle a related civil False Claims Act case based on the fact that federal and state healthcare programs ended up paying claims stemming from the improper prescribing of Nuedexta.

Avanir’s alleged behavior is especially troublesome because of the involvement of elderly dementia patients, but the use of kickbacks is far from unknown in the pharmaceutical industry. In Violation Tracker we document about 50 drug industry cases in which kickbacks were the primary or secondary offense.

These cases, which have resulted in more than $7 billion in fines and settlements, have implicated pretty much every large pharmaceutical producer and numerous smaller ones as well. Some companies show up on the list several times. These include Abbott Laboratories, which along with its subsidiaries has been involved in six cases between 2003 and 2017 that resulted in $630 million in penalties, and Pfizer, which together with its subsidiaries has paid $531 million in five cases between 2004 and 2018.

The extent of the recidivism in drug industry kickback cases suggests that the industry is not taking the problem very seriously and that the Justice Department’s approach has not had the necessary deterrent effect. Perhaps there is a lesson here for the political world as well.

Being Mindful of Paycheck Abuses

It turns out that yoga instructors are mindful about more than poses and breathing. They also make sure they are paid properly for their work. A group of instructors in Illinois who sued CorePower Yoga for violating federal labor law recently reached a final settlement of $1.5 million to resolve allegations that the chain failed to pay them for mandatory out-of-studio work such as class preparation and communicating with students.

The yoga instructors’ case is just one of a remarkable series of settlements that continue to emerge from the courts despite the efforts by employers to thwart collective action against workplace abuses. I keep an eye on these developments as part of my work on Violation Tracker and am amazed at the quantity and variety of wage theft litigation. Here are some other examples I have been collecting to include in the next update of the database.

PetSmart agreed to pay $2.4 million to a group of dog groomers in California who alleged they were shortchanged on overtime and mandatory rest breaks and meal periods.

Zocdoc, an online medical appointment booking service, agreed to pay $1.4 million to resolve a lawsuit filed in New York alleging that the company mistakenly classified sales personnel as exempt from overtime pay.

Safelite agreed to pay $8.2 million to windshield replacement technicians in California who claimed they were not properly paid for administrative duties and time spent traveling to jobs.

Great American Financial Resources agreed to pay $1.25 million in Ohio to settle a dispute involving commissions for insurance agents.

Here are some other cases in which the parties have reached a settlement that is awaiting final court approval:

Morgan Stanley agreed to pay more than $10 million to resolve a lawsuit alleging it improperly refused to reimburse its financial advisers for work-related expenses such as client entertainment.

Pongsri Thai Restaurant in New York agreed to pay $3.7 million to a group of workers to resolve allegations that the company violated overtime and minimum wage regulations.  

FedEx agreed to pay $3.1 million to settle a suit brought by a group of drivers in western New York claiming they were misclassified as independent contractors and subject to improper pay deductions.

Not all these cases are resolved through a settlement. For example, a federal jury in Florida recently awarded $1.2 million to a group of forepersons employed by the tree service company Asplundh who alleged they were improperly denied overtime pay. It is not yet clear whether the company will appeal.  

A federal appeals court recently upheld a $4.6 million verdict won by a group of exotic dancers who had alleged that the Penthouse Club in Philadelphia misclassified them as independent contractors and thus denied them minimum wage and overtime protections.

Two things are made clear by this list. The first is that the problem of wage theft is pervasive. It is present in both old economy and new economy companies and in both highly paid and low-wage occupations. The culprits are both large employers and small ones, and the problem can be found all over the country.

The second conclusion is that, despite adverse rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court and efforts by employers to make it as difficult as possible for workers to sue, there is no sign yet that the flow of successful collective action wage and hour lawsuits is receding.

This is vital at a time when the Trump Labor Department has been seeking to replace federal enforcement with a dubious program promoting voluntary compliance by employers. For now, workers are holding their own in the ongoing battle over paycheck abuses.

Corporations and Economic Sanctions

Large corporations like to claim rights, such as freedom of speech and even freedom of religion, originally intended to apply to individuals. Yet they don’t like it when they are accused of crimes customarily brought against human persons.

That is the situation facing the Swiss cement company LafargeHolcim, whose French operation just escaped prosecution for crimes against humanity but is still facing serious terrorism-related allegations.

The case stems from actions taken by Lafarge half a dozen years ago in Syria, where in an effort to continue doing business in the war-torn country it made substantial payments to jihadi groups such as ISIS.

In 2017 the Paris Public Prosecutor opened an investigation of the company for financing terrorism, and the following year Lafarge and several executives were indicted for complicity in crimes against humanity and other offenses. The most serious allegation was just dismissed by an appeals court, but two NGOs that brought the original complaint – Sherpa and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights – are seeking to have the charge reinstated. Whether or not that happens, Lafarge will still face charges of financing terrorism and violating a trade embargo.

In the United States there have been numerous cases accusing large corporations of violating economic sanctions imposed on countries such as Iran, North Korea and Cuba. We have more than 400 such entries in Violation Tracker with total penalties of more than $16 billion. These were mostly brought by the U.S. Justice Department or Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

Our next Violation Tracker update will include another two dozen such cases brought by the Manhattan District Attorney and the New York State Department of Financial Services that will add billions more to the penalty total.

The largest of these cases involved the French bank BNP Paribas, which in 2015 was penalized more than $8 billion after being convicted of conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the Trading with the Enemy Act by processing billions of dollars of transactions through the U.S. financial system on behalf of Sudanese, Iranian and Cuban entities subject to U.S. economic sanctions.

BNP was sentenced to a five-year term of probation and ordered to forfeit $8.8 billion to the United States and pay a $140 million fine.  This was the first time a financial institution had been convicted and sentenced for violations of U.S. economic sanctions, and the total financial penalty was the largest ever imposed in a criminal case.

One difference between the U.S. cases and the French one involving Lafarge is that individual executives at large corporations are usually not targeted by American authorities. This allows the companies to buy their way out of the legal jeopardy, and no one ends up behind bars.

That’s also true, of course, for other kinds of business misconduct and is one of the key reasons the corporate crime wave never seems to end.

Underregulation

The ink was barely dry on the 1970s laws creating the EPA, OSHA and other new federal agencies overseeing business activities when a counterattack began. For the past four decades, there has been an endless drumbeat of claims about the supposedly pernicious effects of regulation and continuous calls for weakening or eliminating rules.

This ongoing anti-regulatory campaign lets up only when a major incident – such as a massive oil spill or fatal industrial explosion – contradicts the argument that things would be fine if we let corporations manage their affairs with as little interference as possible. As soon as the uproar dies down, business apologists return to their customary posture, in the same way that the NRA handles mass shootings.

We are now in another of those periods, but with a significant difference. Instead of a single situation reminding us of the value of regulation, we now have multiple scandals at the same time.

It’s been clear for quite a while that reckless behavior by opioid producers and distributors – along with insufficient oversight by the FDA and DEA — was largely responsible for many thousands of overdose deaths. The industry has been hit with a wave of lawsuits and is now beginning to pay out billions of dollars in settlements.

It’s becoming clearer by the day that it was a monumental error for the FAA to cede oversight of the development of Boeing’s 737 Max to the company itself. Newly disclosed internal corporate documents indicate that Boeing was aware of safety problems with the plane and downplayed the risks in communicating with the agency.

It’s become apparent that Juul exploited the permissive approach of the FDA and marketed its vaping products not only to adult tobacco smokers trying to quit but also to young people, hooking many of them on nicotine for the first time. Now those young people are caught up in an epidemic of lung ailments linked to vaping.

The widespread wildfires in California are attributed in part to faulty transmission lines that PG&E has not adequately repaired and upgraded. Now the company is trying to mitigate the longstanding problem by imposing frequent blackouts on millions of customers.

Tech companies such as Amazon have taken advantage of weak antitrust enforcement to expand their dominance in a growing number of markets, forcing smaller companies into subservience or putting them out of business.

How many examples of corporate misconduct and feeble government oversight will it take to get across the message that in the vast majority of cases the problem is not overregulation but underregulation?

One significant obstacle is Donald Trump, who has embraced deregulation and likes to claim that weakening oversight, especially at the EPA, will promote job growth and prosperity. At a time when many large corporations are taking a more nuanced approach to social responsibility issues, Trump is touting crude anti-regulatory positions and climate-change denialism. In its latest move, the Trump EPA is reportedly planning to roll back an Obama-era regulation limiting emissions of heavy metals like arsenic, lead and mercury from coal-fired power plants.

Fortunately, many of Trump’s regulatory rollbacks are carried out in an inept way and get tied up in court. Yet the administration could still end up doing significant damage, if only in fostering the distorted idea that regulation-bashing is a populist position rather than a central part of the corporate agenda.  

Immunity Disorders

Immunity was once a term used mainly in discussing medical conditions, but Donald Trump and his defenders have seized on it as an all-purpose defense in dealing with the Mueller investigation and now the Ukraine probe. Trump’s lawyers just made preposterous claims about the scope of Presidential immunity in appellate court arguments seeking to block a subpoena for Trump Organization business records.

The claim is based on the dubious argument that having to respond to a criminal case would unduly distract the president from his duties. Given that Trump seems to relish doing battle with those who dare to investigate him, it is unlikely that an indictment would change his behavior much. If Trump is successful in his immunity claims, that would go a long way in putting the presidency above the law.

At least the debate on presidential immunity is being conducted in the open. There is another form of effective immunity that is rarely described as such but is also dangerous to our society.

That is the de facto immunity that chief executives of large companies enjoy in cases of egregious corporate misconduct. Consider some of the issues that dominate the business news these days.

  • Large pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors stand accused of fostering an opioid epidemic that has resulted in tens of thousands of overdose deaths.
  • Johnson & Johnson is involved in a series of controversies about asbestos in baby powder, dangerous pelvic mesh and improper marketing of an anti-psychotic drug.
  • Boeing is facing allegations that it covered up serious safety hazards in a new jetliner that was involved in two fatal crashes before being taken out of service.
  • Exxon Mobil is facing lawsuits accusing it of suppressing for many years internal evidence of the costs and consequences of climate change exacerbated by its own operations.
  • PG&E is alleged to be responsible for wildfires in California that took scores and lives and destroyed thousands of homes.

What all these situations have in common is that the defendants are the corporations themselves rather than the individual executives ultimately responsible for the actions or policies that created the harms. We have come to take it for granted that corporations can shield their officers and board members from liability and use the company’s coffers to buy their way out of legal jeopardy.

This is, of course, nothing new. Top executives of the big banks escaped individual prosecution for their role in the financial meltdown, as did CEOs in many other scandals.

There have been a few exceptions. Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling was sentenced to 24 years in prison for his role in that company’s giant fraud, but he used his resources to fight the sentence and ended up spending only half that amount of time behind bars.

In Violation Tracker we have 380,000 cases of corporate misconduct, including 84 in which a company paid a penalty of $1 billion or more. If we had chosen to compile data on convictions of corporate executives rather than companies, the list would fit on a single page.

If we are lucky, the courts will strike down the spurious claims of presidential immunity. Yet we must also find ways to make sure that rogue chief executives also remain within the reach of the law.

Inflicting Financial Pain on the Pain Pill Pushers

The proceedings in a Cleveland courtroom are addressing issues about the fundamental nature of a major American industry. The case consolidates more than 2,000 lawsuits brought mainly by state and local governments against all the major parties responsible for the opioid crisis: the drug manufacturers, the drug distributors, the pharmacy benefit managers, the large drugstore chains and major supermarket chains whose stores contain pharmacies.

What is known as Multidistrict Litigation 2804 is scheduled to begin trial proceedings on October 21 in a partial action involving two Ohio counties and a handful of the corporate defendants — unless Judge Aaron Polster (photo) succeeds in his effort to get the parties to reach a settlement. Reports on potential deals have been emerging at frequent intervals. The New York Times reports that several of the defendants, including the three big drug distributors – AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson – together with two of the pharmaceutical producers, have been offering a deal worth nearly $50 billion.

That sounds like a lot of money, but there may be less to it than meets the eye. For one thing, only about half the total consists of cash payments, with the rest taking the form of addiction treatment drugs, supplies and delivery services. It would be easy for the companies to inflate the value of the in-kind compensation and thus lower their burden.

Moreover, the cash payments would probably be paid out over time, again making things easier for the defendants and reducing the resources that state and local governments need in the short term. Those costs are massive. The Times quotes a report by the Society of Actuaries estimating the cost to society of the opioid epidemic at roughly $188 billion this year alone.

This suggests that a reasonable settlement should be some multiple of the $50 billion figure currently being considered. The 1998 Master Tobacco Settlement showed that a large profitable industry could handle payments that were estimated to cost $206 billion, spread out over time. The industry has paid out more than $132 billion over the past two decades, with annual payments in recent years amounting to about $6 billion.

The plaintiffs should not focus on the total theoretical size of the settlement but instead on how much will be available to each jurisdiction each year to address a problem that remains overwhelming.

It is also worth remembering the size of the industry in question. The big three drug distributors alone have combined annual revenues of more than $500 billion. Their deep pockets and those of the other defendants should be depleted as much as possible.

The drug industry giants have caused massive pain and suffering in the opioid epidemic. They should be made to feel substantial financial pain of their own.

Back Pedaling on Kickbacks?

It’s hard not to be suspicious when the Secretary of Health and Human Services promotes a supposed reform by stating that “President Trump has promised American patients a healthcare system with affordable, personalized care, a system that puts you in control, provides peace of mind, and treats you like a human being, not a number. But too often, government regulations have stood in the way of delivering that kind of care.”

Secretary Alex Azar used those dubious statements in a press release about his department’s plan to “modernize and clarify” the regulations that interpret the Physician Self-Referral Law (known as the Stark Law) and the Federal Anti-Kickback Statute.

Azar claims that the rule changes would promote new methods of delivering healthcare based on greater coordination among providers, including those with financial relationships with one another.

The changes are technical in nature, but I cannot help but worry that the scheme would serve to legitimize dubious dealings and enable providers to avoid prosecution under laws that have been in place for several decades.

I have become more familiar with these laws in the course of collecting data for Violation Tracker. The database currently contains more than 360 cases in which kickbacks and bribery are involved as the primary or secondary offense. These cases have resulted in more than $14 billion in fines and settlements involving many of the largest names in pharmaceuticals (Merck, Amgen, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Pfizer, et al.), hospitals (Tenet, HCA, among others) and pharmacies (such as CVS).

The biggest penalty is a $2.2 billion agreement signed by Johnson & Johnson in 2013 to resolve civil and criminal charges of paying kickbacks to physicians to encourage them to prescribe several of its drugs for uses not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

One of those drugs was the anti-psychotic medication Risperdal, which was only approved for schizophrenia but which J&J was allegedly promoting for other less serious conditions among elderly patients through financial inducements to providers.

In an interesting coincidence, the announcement of the new HHS proposal came at almost exactly the same time that a jury in Philadelphia hit J&J with an $8 billion verdict over its marketing of Risperdal for use by children.

It will be interesting to see whether the new HHS rules on kickbacks, if they go through, manage to distinguish between more innocent financial dealings among providers and the corrupt practices that have been so common among the larger players. Given this administration’s track record on healthcare and so many other issues, we cannot give it the benefit of the doubt.

Capital Punishment

Some corporate critics have argued that the only way to deter egregious misconduct by companies may be to give prosecutors the option to seek the “death penalty”—revocation of the firm’s charter and the closing of the business.

Ever since the dismantling of Arthur Andersen after its conviction on criminal charges relating to its auditing of Enron, prosecutors at the federal level have avoided seeking that harsh remedy. In fact, they moved sharply in the other direction by adopting dubious arrangements known as deferred prosecution and non-prosecution agreements that allow companies essentially to buy their way out of criminal jeopardy. A recent report from Public Citizen found that these arrangements have been a failure in deterring corporate wrongdoing.

Yet what has received less attention is the fact that the corporate death penalty is alive and well at the state level. Numerous state AGs have been using this method to deal with those firms considered unredeemable bad actors.

For example, the Delaware AG Kathy Jennings recently announced that she had filed actions in the state Court of Chancery to dissolve 15 Delaware business entities for involvement in criminal activities. Her press release stated: “State law allows the Attorney General to petition for cancellation of an entity’s Delaware formation document when its powers, privileges, or existence have been abused or misused.”

Among the firms she moved to dissolve were LOAV Ltd., Davis Manafort International LLC, DMP International LLC, BADE LLC, Jupiter Holdings Management, LLC, and Davis, Manafort & Stone, Inc. The principals of these companies, the AG noted, were Paul Manafort and Richard Gates, who pleaded guilty in 2018 to charges involving money laundering, failing to register as a foreign agent, failure to report bank transactions, and making false statements. Manafort was also convicted in 2018 by a jury of tax and bank fraud charges. The charges against the two men included allegations that they used the named businesses to illegally conceal from the United States government millions of dollars in income received from the Ukrainian government as well as evading roughly $1.4 million in personal income taxes owed to the IRS while funding lavish personal expenditures.

The AG also proposed to dissolve Essential Consultants LLC, which was used by former Trump fixer Michael Cohen to facilitate a hush-money payment of $130,000 to Stormy Daniels.

Previously, the Delaware AG was successful in forcing four LLCs linked to the now defunct website Backpage.com to relinquish their state certificates of formation in the wake of allegations that the site promoted prostitution and human trafficking.

Not all the companies forced to dissolve are quite so well known. In the course of collecting data for our recent report on state AGs, my colleagues and I came across numerous cases in which obscure firms such as home contractors or used-car dealers were forced out of business.

For example, in July 2011 the Oregon AG announced that a company called S&S Drywall Assemblies was ordered dissolved as part of the resolution of criminal racketeering and antitrust charges brought against the company and its owner.

In some cases a state AG would carry out what amounted to a partial death sentence by banning an out-of-state company from continuing to operate in the AG’s state while it may continue to function elsewhere. We found numerous cases of this in North Dakota, which rarely penalized in-state companies but did not hesitate to ban misbehaving out-of-state ones. One of these targets was a traveling asphalt paving company.

We did not include these cases in our report or the state AG data we added to Violation Tracker because the dissolutions or state bans usually did not include monetary penalties, the common denominator among the varied cases contained in our database.

Clearly, it’s much easier for state AGs to dissolve smaller firms than it would be for federal prosecutors to do the same to large corporations with thousands of employees and shareholders. States also have the advantage that corporate chartering is a function that they, not the feds, control.

There is a feeling of satisfaction that comes from seeing a rogue company shut down that does not go along with a deferred prosecution agreement and a far-from-confiscatory monetary penalty. There has to be some way to bridge the gap.

Sweet Deals for Corporate Wrongdoers

We have been hearing plenty this year about the unwillingness of the Justice Department to bring criminal charges against Donald Trump, but a new report from Public Citizen shows there is an even bigger non-prosecution scandal when it comes to lawbreaking by large corporations.

Soft on Corporate Crime is a detailed analysis of the long-standing yet still disturbing practice by which big companies found to be involved in serious misconduct are given a sweet deal not typically available to individual criminals. These deals, known as non-prosecution and deferred prosecution agreements, allow the company to avoid criminal charges if it admits to the wrongdoing, pays a penalty, and signs an agreement that leaves open the prospect of future prosecution if the bad behavior continues.

Using data from the Corporate Prosecution Registry, Public Citizen examined the 535 NPAs and DPAs the Justice Department has entered into since 1992. The report finds that the practice originated in the Clinton Administration and has been used widely during both Democratic and Republican presidencies. The Trump Administration’s DOJ has continued the trend amid its overall reduction in corporate prosecutions.

NPAs and DPAs are part of a fundamental unwillingness of the U.S. justice system to get really tough with corporate miscreants, no matter how egregious their behavior. The argument for using these agreements is that conventional prosecutions of large corporations could result in their demise—as happened in the Arthur Andersen case of the early 2000s—and thereby cause great harm to employees and shareholders.

The theory is that having companies admit responsibility for the misconduct and pay substantial monetary penalties would be enough to deter future wrongdoing. Yet Public Citizen’s research makes it clear that the deterrent effect of NPAs and DPAs is quite weak.

The report finds 38 examples in which companies that had signed those agreements were later the subject of a new criminal enforcement action by DOJ. The problem is that DOJ rarely punishes repeat offenders for violating NPAs and DPAs. Public Citizen found only seven examples, and of these only three corporations—UBS, Barclays and Aibel Group—faced full prosecution for their recidivism. In other cases, the penalty, if you can call it that, was simply to extend the terms of the NPA or DPA and sometimes an additional monetary penalty.

Public Citizen highlights seven egregious examples of corporate repeat offenders that have received multiple DPAs and/or NPAs. These include four banks (HSBC, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase and Societe Generale) along with Bristol-Myers Squibb, Zimmer Biomet and Las Vegas Sands.

Although the report focuses on corporate criminal recidivism, it is worth pointing out that many of these companies were embroiled in civil misconduct cases in the period during which they were supposed to be on their best behavior to comply with the NPA or DPA.

For example, as shown in Violation Tracker, in the period since JPMorgan entered into its first NPA in 2011 it has paid more than $26 billion in civil penalties (including settlements). A substantial portion of that total comes from actions that date back to the 2000s, but there is still a strong indication that the NPA did not do much to change the bank’s overall behavior.

The bank’s civil and criminal wrongdoing seemed to have little effect on DOJ’s treatment of the company either. It’s true that JPMorgan had to plead guilty in 2015 to conspiring with other banks to manipulate global currency exchange rates, yet the following year it was offered an NPA in another case.

Public Citizen concludes that the Justice Department’s NPA/DPA system has been a failure, finding that instead of deterring future misconduct the agreements have “enabled further wrongdoing.” At the very least, the report concludes, DOJ should stop offering the agreements to repeat offenders but the ultimate fix would be to end the practice completely and prosecute corporations to the fullest.

Note: Violation Tracker has 360 NPA or DPA entries dating back to 2000. A list can be found here.