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The Corporate Crime Observatory is delighted to announce the establishment of a partnership with Violation Tracker: A Database of Corporate Crime and Misconduct. Welcome to our partner's Director of the Corporate Research Project, Philip Mattera.
Violation Tracker is a wide-ranging database on corporate crime and misconduct in the United States. Launched in 2015, it has grown since then to more than half a million resolved civil and criminal cases brought by some 400 federal, state, and local enforcement agencies and prosecutors. Coverage extends back to January 2000, and the content is regularly updated. Violation Tracker is produced by the Corporate Research Project of the US-based NGO Good Jobs First.
The areas covered by Violation Tracker include environmental protection, labor standards, workplace safety and health, discriminatory practices, consumer protection, antitrust, bribery, fraud, investor protection, and more. Along with regulatory agency enforcement actions and government prosecutions, it includes class action lawsuits in categories such as privacy, product liability, and wage theft.
Cases involving companies of all sizes are included in Violation Tracker, but the database puts a special emphasis on identifying those firms that are units or subsidiaries of a universe of more than 3,000 major corporations headquartered in the United States or elsewhere. These linkages allow the user to see which parents account for the largest number of cases and the highest aggregate penalty totals.
The 538,000 cases currently documented in Violation Tracker account for $817 billion in penalties,
including fines as well as settlements. There are nearly 100 parent companies with penalty totals in
excess of $1 billion; sixteen of them exceed $10 billion.
Every entry in Violation Tracker includes a link back to an official data source, such as a press release or report published by the regulatory agency. Class action lawsuit entries include full legal citations as well as links to PACER court dockets. The website has extensive search options as well as a detailed user guide and a list of all the online sources from which we obtain case data.
Most of the data gathered by Violation Tracker can be used free of charge. Subscribers have access to several special features, such as historical parent-subsidiary linkages.
In 2021 the Corporate Research Project launched Violation Tracker UK, which brings together data on enforcement actions by more than 40 regulatory agencies in the United Kingdom. It currently contains 77,000 cases going back to the beginning of 2010 and has a parent universe of about 700 corporations.
The next project is Violation Tracker Global, which is planned to collect data from key enforcement agencies in selected countries in the European Union as well as Canada, Australia, Japan, and other larger economies with developed regulatory systems.
For more information, contact: Philip Mattera, Director of the Corporate Research Project, at:
pmattera@goodjobsfirst.org