Tracking corporate abuses around the world

When you’re up against a corporation as a campaigner, it can be incredibly useful to know what else that corporation has been up to around the world.

The Violation Trackers are online databases of regulatory violations and other abuses committed by corporations around the world, based on official records.

The databases were created by Good Jobs First, a non-profit research centre based in Washington DC, and now there are three of them: one for cases brought in the United States, one for the United Kingdom and one for the rest of the world.

Searching the databases and displaying the results is free. A fee is charged to download data in spreadsheet form, in order to cover some of the running costs, though campaigners who need to do so should talk to Good Jobs First. (There’s no fee for downloads from the UK version).

Critical Takes talked to Philip Mattera, director of the Violation Tracker Project at Good Jobs First, to find out more about these databases. This Q&A is an edited version of his responses to questions from Diarmid.

 

What data do the Violation Tracker databases contain?

We document cases in which companies have been penalised for environmental abuses, employment abuses, consumer abuses and other misconduct relating to financial matters, healthcare, procurement - basically all the different ways in which companies can behave badly.

 

The US Violation Tracker

We started with a US version that now covers more than 350 Federal, state and local regulatory agencies throughout the US and companies of all sizes. We aggregate the data for a universe of about 3,500 parent companies, but we also include the cases involving smaller firms.

We’ve got data back to the year 2000 and a total of more than 700,000 records. In the US we only include cases in which there is a monetary penalty of at least US$5,000.

The penalties that we document, in the aggregate, are in excess of one trillion dollars and those are just the cases in which companies got caught!

 

The UK Violation Tracker

The UK database also collects cases on companies of all sizes, from very small ones up to the very largest. We’ve got data from national regulators in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland and more than 130 local authorities.

In the UK we aggregate about 900 parent companies, though the UK data only goes back to 2010. Most of our data comes from what’s posted online, though when that’s not available we try to use open records requests to supplement that.

For the UK there’s no monetary threshold because the UK makes much greater use of warnings [to companies] so if we used the equivalent of a five-thousand-dollar threshold, we would lose a very large number of cases.

 

Violation Tracker Global

The global database only includes cases that are linked to a universe of larger parent companies, about two thousand of them currently. Violation Tracker Global also includes cases from the U.S. and UK versions relating to those 2,000 parent companies.

We’re now collecting data from about seventy-five countries around the world which account for about 98 per cent of world GDP. We found that we had reached a point of diminishing returns in looking at some of the very small countries.

I was actually quite surprised at the limitations of the reporting in the EU countries. I thought that they would be as good as, if not better than the UK and the US, but they're actually much more limited in certain areas, particularly in environmental and labour reporting. They’re good in other areas like competition and banking.

Part of it is that much more enforcement in Europe is done at the sub-national level, by prosecutors rather than by regulatory agencies, and those cases are just not collected efficiently. If a case is significant enough to have received any media attention, then we will use reliable secondary sources to document that case, whether in European or other countries.

There are countries where we’re having even more difficulty, such as China. Part of it is language difficulties, and the government reporting is very limited. So we feel that our information on China is rather incomplete compared to a lot of other countries.

 

What about tax avoidance cases?

We do have some tax cases. In the global version there are about 140 cases and these are bigger cases [for example, US companies receiving special tax benefits in Ireland which have since been struck down by the European Commission]. And there are some cases where large banks have been helping their customers evade taxes: we have some of those.

But there are a lot of more routine tax cases where there’s a disagreement [with a tax authority] about the way in which the company calculated its tax liability, and they’re hit with a bill to pay some additional amount. Often they’re not disclosed as regulatory matters.

 

Who uses the Violation Trackers?

Lots of different people, because it is a public resource. The main user base is campaigners, activists and people of that kind.

One way that campaigners use it is that if they’re doing a campaign against a company on one topic, it's helpful to know the other areas in which the company has misbehaved. If a campaign is working on a company's environmental record, the chances are they've researched that exhaustively, but they may not readily know about the company's labour record or cases involving competition, consumer protection, financial matters, et cetera.

What we're providing is a shortcut for campaigners be able to look at the full range of misconduct on the part of companies, and sometimes being able to refer to other kinds of abuses can help bolster your argument that the company is a bad actor.

The database is often cited in reports that groups have done here in the US. People have used our data in US Congressional testimony and in some proceedings before Parliament in the UK. It’s sometimes used in filings here in the US by activists who are attempting to get a vote from shareholders on a company policy.

Another important category of users are trade unions: both individual unions as well as some of the union federations. For example, the International Trade Union Confederation is using our data in a project they call Corporate Underminers of Democracy.

There are other campaigners of various kinds, consumer groups, and government agencies in the US [prior to the Trump administration]. Several UK government agencies have told us that they use our data and we’re provided a couple of them with custom data sets.

Another group of users are investors, particularly corporate social responsibility investors. We’ve frequently been cited by journalists. Another category are lawyers who use our data in preparing class action lawsuits, or when they’re doing due diligence for a client.

Academics are a very big user. We’ve had more than 500 academics from around the world who have published dozens of scholarly articles using our data.

And then, finally, corporations themselves use the data: as part of their risk management process, to monitor their competitors or to compare their record to their competition’s record.

We’ve licenced some full data sets to companies that feature prominently in the data. Our feeling is that all of our information is basically in the public domain and the revenue we get from that licencing activity allows us to keep the main resource available for free.

 

What plans are there for the Violation Trackers in future?

I think we've run out of useful jurisdictions. As I mentioned, there are some where we need to fill in, like China. For all the countries that we cover, we would like to know that we are collecting data on all the important corporations that are doing business there, whether they are multinational or not.

For the Violation Tracker Global, we started with about 1,500 parent companies and now we’re up to about 2,100. There are at least a few hundred more that we’d probably want to include.

The other area we’re looking to expand in is private litigation. In the US we have quite a lot of information on class action lawsuits, particularly in employment matters like wage theft.

Class actions have not been very common in the UK but they’re starting to emerge and we’ll look at them as they do. There are a few other countries like Canada which do have extensive class actions and we’re starting to collect that information.

I urge users of the databases, especially campaigners, to let us know how we can make them more useful to their work.

 

 

The Q&A ends here.