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Prosecution of Corporate Crime Varies Widely by Location, Program and Agency

“Federal prosecutors routinely fail to send agency referrals of alleged corporate criminal conduct on to the courts, according to an analysis of hundreds of thousands of Justice Department records for the five-year period covering fiscal years 2010 through 2014. The study by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) also found very wide variations in the corporate prosecution rates among the 90-plus offices of the semi-autonomous U.S. Attorneys. For the nation as a whole, the relatively rare prosecution of corporations — only 12.3 percent of all referrals that allege corporate criminal conduct — sharply contrasts with the 82.1 percent rate for referrals concerning individual criminals. TRAC’s study profiles the ten investigative agencies that referred the most corporations for alleged criminal activity, and examines success rates in terms of how frequently their cases were prosecuted. With only 6.6 percent of its criminal referrals prosecuted, the FBI does not stand out by this measure. For more details, including counts of corporate criminal referrals received by each U.S. Attorney and the percentage each prosecutes, see the full report at: http://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/crim/411/. TRAC’s new report is the second in a continuing series examining various aspects of the government’s effort to deal with corporate crime. The first report, documenting the drop in corporate prosecutions, can be found at: http://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/crim/406/

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