Regulatory fines, criminal penalties, and class-action settlements paid by corporations in the United States since 2000 have now surpassed $1 trillion. Over that period of time, total annual payouts for corporate misconduct grew from around $7 billion per year in the early 2000s to more than $50 billion in recent years, according to a new report by Good Jobs First.
This amounts to a seven-fold increase in current dollars — a 300% increase in constant dollars.
These figures are derived from Violation Tracker, a wide-ranging database containing information on more than 600,000 cases from about 500 federal, state and local regulatory agencies and prosecutors as well as court data on major private lawsuits.
The database shows that 127 large parent companies have each paid more than $1 billion in fines and settlements over the past quarter-century. The most penalized industries are financial services and pharmaceuticals, followed by oil and gas, motor vehicles, and utilities.
“The fact that penalties have reached the 10-figure level suggests that we have been living through a continuous corporate crime wave,” said Philip Mattera, Good Jobs First research director and lead author of the report. “Every year, companies pay out billions of dollars for a wide range of offenses. Many large corporations are fined or enter into settlements over and over again, often for the same or similar misconduct.”
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration accounts for more than one-third of the 600,000 cases in Violation Tracker, which includes only fines of $5,000 or more. But because OSHA’s fines have been kept artificially low and are often below that threshold, the agency accounts for only $3 billion of the $1 trillion total (for example, a company in 2024 pays a maximum fine of just over $16,000 when an employee is killed on the job).
Among the findings:
Bank of America has by far the largest penalty total at $87 billion. It and other banks, both domestic and…
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