The US Department of Justice Corporate Crime Database

Niall Hearty of Rahman Ravelli outlines the purpose and contents of the DOJ’s latest asset.

The United States’ Department of Justice (DOJ) has launched a database tracking all corporate crime cases resolved since the end of April 2023.

The database, which currently contains 11 cases, is part of what the DOJ has called its “ongoing commitment to transparency”. It will gather together all corporate crime cases from across the US that are considered to be significant or relevant.

A DOJ spokesman has said that the database is likely to be expanded to take in cases from previous years.

The database is the first time that such information has all been held in the same place. It will include cases against companies and individual cases that relate to corporate activity and will be able to be searched using a variety of criteria. It will provide the details of a case as well as links to relevant documents.

The DOJ had been pressed by US Democrats for such a database. Last November, three Democrats introduced a bill that would require the director of the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics to collect and analyse information about enforcement actions relating to corporate offences and publish the data on the DOJ’s website. They argued that while data is regularly collected on most types of “street-level’’ crime, the same attention is not paid to corporate and white-collar crime, with the last in-depth DOJ report on corporate crime being produced in 1979. But the bill was not passed.