The Corporate Most-Wanted List

over the past two decades. From the Bush administration’s torture program to the Catholic Church pedophilia scandal to the cacophony of malfeasance in the Trump administration, crime has not been a deterrent to prospering in America. And in the corporate realm, practically nobody—from the bankers who caused the mortgage crash to the engineers who lied about Volkswagen’s environmental capabilities to the airbag makers at Takata to a seemingly limitless number of others—has seen the inside of a prison cell for major violations of law. Federal white-collar prosecutions plunged to a 25-year low in 2020.

That’s why it wasn’t that surprising to me that Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco’s announcement of a new approach to tackling corporate crime attracted relatively little attention among the public. We’ve heard these kinds of statements from Democratic Justice Departments before; in the fall of 2015, the so-called “Yates Memo” staked out similar territory on targeting individuals involved in corporate violations, yet this did not meaningfully alter the trajectory in the final years of the Obama administration. We’ve reached a point where there won’t be any credibility to DOJ’s promises until action is actually taken.

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