TTF Blog: 05 October 2020

Tracking fines issued by regulators is one way to measure ‘recidivism’ – when a company is repeatedly fined for committing the same offence again over the years.

In the United Kingdom, fraud, bribery and other economic crime can be dealt with via ‘Deferred Prosecution Agreements’ overseen by a judge.  Fines are also levied by other regulators in fully prosecuted cases. For example, this dataset by the Environment Agency shows they have issued just over £98 million in fines since the year 2000.

Violation Tracker (VT) is a powerful tool used in the United States to keep tabs on all fines across all industries. Transparency Task Force is launching a campaign to bring it to the United Kingdom.

Using the existing database, for the United States, you can see, for example:

• that fines for financial offenses since the year 2000 have totalled $305,457,241,721, and that JP Morgan Chase tops that list.
• that there have been just over $96billion of fines in the United States for environmental offenses largely to oil companies, with BP, British Petroleum, having paid-out the most, $27,827,796,980 covering 142 separate violations over the last twenty years.
• that Wells Fargo topped VT’s bill in fines for ‘fraud’ due to $3billion levied on the bank in a single penalty this year.
  
• that Facebook tops VT’s bill for consumer-protection-related offenses paying $5,002,450,000 in fines for just two offenses.

TTF’s founder Andy Agathangelou told Reaction‘s Maggie Pagano last week: “Wherever you are on the political spectrum – capitalist or socialist – we need properly functioning and transparent markets. It’s particularly important for those supporting free markets as they need to ensure that capitalism is doing what it is designed to do, and not to be distorted by the bad behaviour of big corporations.”

Andy’s expertise resides in the pensions industry, and he was instrumental in campaigning for Parliament’s current inquiry on pension scams He explains: “The [pensions] industry has been let down by the poor behaviour of a few people and organisations, which has tarnished reputation for the industry as a whole. It’s important that trust is restored.”

One key arm of accountability is to make sure that fully compliant and purpose-led companies are transparently visible, and also that bad behaviour is visible and trackable. We see the value of transparent accountability not only in financial services, but across all industries.

In the United States, Violation Tracker has been used by NGOs, journalists and regulators themselves – Greg LeRoy, who launched the project there five years ago, explains that: “Environmental Protection Agency staffers were heavy users of Violation Tracker” and that Occupational Safety and Health Administration staffers were ‘directly trained’ to use the tool, by recommendation of President Obama’s OSHA director, because: ‘our parent-subsidiary matching system makes our version of the data more useful than the original agency data in identifying ultimate corporate recidivists’.

All these examples have led us to believe that Violation Tracker can be a valuable resource in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. We are running a live interview with Greg LeRoy, who created the tool in the United States, tomorrow evening and are inviting press and any interested NGOs to attend.