Violation Tracker contains information from official sources on more than 600,000 cases in which companies and large non-profits paid monetary penalties for regulatory violations and other forms of misconduct. Those entities include subsidiaries linked to a universe of more than 3,000 parent companies as well as smaller firms without parents. The parents are both publicly traded and privately held, and are both U.S.-headquartered corporations as well as foreign firms with U.S. operations.
Searching and displaying search results can be done free of charge, but downloading search results and viewing several data fields are limited to subscribers. More information on subscriptions can be found here.
There are three main ways of accessing the data in Violation Tracker: using the basic search page; viewing a variety of summary pages; or constructing a custom search using numerous variables listed on the Advanced Search page.
The homepage of Violation Tracker contains three search boxes. The first allows you to enter all or part of a company name, including parents. Type in the text and hit Search. A list of results will appear. You can click on any of the individual items to see the full entry. You can combine the company name with one of a list of broad offense groups and/or the name of the regulatory agency that brought the action.
If you have the name of a likely parent company and want to see an overview of its violations, you can choose from the large dropdown menu of parents that appears on the bottom of the homepage to access a summary page containing penalty totals and links to the individual cases that make up those totals. On the Summaries page, you can also view overviews for parent industries, offense groups, regulatory agencies (federal, state or local), and parent headquarters states or countries--as well as lists such as the most penalized parents. We have also added summary pages for what we call Mega-Scandals--clusters of major cases in which companies paid penalties of $25 million or more for harming large numbers of consumers, workers, investors or community members.
On this page you can combine a company name with a variety of other variables. Be sure to click the Search button at the bottom after making your choices (and hit the Clear button when moving to a new search). You will be taken to a search results page with links to individual cases that match your criteria.
Consult the User Guide for more details on search options, search results and individual entries. Consult the Mini Guides for details on searching specific types of cases.
Cases brought against Koch Industries and its many subsidiaries (choose “Koch Industries” from the Parent Companies dropdown at the bottom of the homepage)
Cases involving bank misconduct (choose “financial services” from the Parent Industries dropdown on the Summaries page)
Wage theft cases (choose “wage and hour violation” from the Offense Type dropdown in the Advanced Search; click on Search)
Cases brought against companies in connection with the opioid crisis (choose "Opioid Crisis" from the Mega-Scandals dropdown on the Summaries page)
Cases involving fraud by federal contractors, including healthcare providers (choose “False Claims Act and related” from the Offense Type dropdown in the Advanced Search; click on Search)
Lawsuits filed against corporations by groups of states (choose Multistate Attorneys General Case from the State and Local Agencies dropdown on the Summaries page)
Privacy-related class action lawsuits (choose “private litigation” from the Action Type dropdown and “privacy violations” from the Offense Group dropdown, both in the Advanced Search; click the Search button)
Employment discrimination cases against private equity portfolio companies (choose “private equity” from the Parent Industry dropdown and “employment discrimination” from the Offense Type dropdown, both in the Advanced Search; click the Search button)
Cases in which companies were offered deferred prosecution or non-prosecution agreements (choose “only criminal cases with deferred prosecution or non-prosecution agreement” from the Case Type dropdown in the Advanced Search; click the Search button)
Foreign bribery cases brought against companies with parents headquartered in the UK (choose “Foreign Corrupt Practices Act” from the Offense Type dropdown and “United Kingdom” from the Parent HQ State/Country dropdown, both in the Advanced Search; click on Search button)
Environmental cases resolved during the Obama Administration with penalties of $1 billion or more (choose “environment-related offenses” from the Offense Group dropdown, choose “Obama” from the Presidential Administration dropdown, and enter 1000000000 in the Penalty Amount/is greater than field, all in the Advanced Search; click the Search button).
The parent company at the time the penalty was announced (if different from the current parent)
A summary of ownership changes between the penalty announcement and the present
A list of the most penalized parents based on linkages when penalties were announced (Summaries page)
The ability to search by historical parent name (Advanced Search page)
Links to key court documents in private litigation cases
When a subscriber is logged in, subscriber-only content is marked with a green star.
If you have problems with a search, contact Phil Mattera.
