Dear Colleague:
The Bauman Foundation and the Public Welfare Foundation invite you to an Oct. 28 funders'
briefing from 1:00 pm to 2:30 pm (eastern) on: New Research and Resources on Regulatory
Enforcement, Compliance and Corporate Misconduct. RSVP here.
GM’s faulty ignition switch, BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill, an explosion in Dupont’s La Porte
chemical plant, HSBC’s deficiencies that continue to allow massive money-laundering by its
clients (including with Mexican drug cartels), sweetheart deals for Wall Street megabanks, and
peanut butter tainted by salmonella. In each of these examples, people were taken advantage
of, injured, or died because corners were cut and rules were ignored. And these are just a few
of the examples of corporate misconduct that have been in the headlines recently.
Federal rules and standards designed to prevent these tragedies were in place. But the rules
have to be enforced to protect the public and ensure all corporate actors behave responsibly.
Today, too often, corporate violators are not held accountable for decisions that harm: slap-onthe-wrist penalties; deferred prosecutions vaguely written and largely unmonitored leave the
courts unable to act; and few corporate executives are criminally prosecuted for their decisions
or held personally culpable.
This funders’ briefing will discuss the state of regulatory enforcement. It will highlight a new
report in the Center for Effective Government’s Reduce Our Risks campaign – Blowing Smoke
on Community Health and Safety – that calls for improved oversight and better enforcement of
the chemical industry, and it will unveil and demonstrate a new online database, Violation
Tracker, created by the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First designed to give
advocates and public better information about the companies that fail to follow the rules.
Violation Tracker will be made public about the same time as this briefing.
DETAILS ON THE FUNDERS’ BRIEFING
WHEN:
OCTOBER 28, 2015 FROM 1:00 TO 2:30 PM (EASTERN)
WHERE: BAUMAN FOUNDATION, 2040 S STREET NW, W ASHINGTON, DC
OR YOU CAN PARTICIPATE REMOTELY THROUGH WEBINAR SOFTWARE OR TELEPHONE
RSVP:
GO TO HTTP://BIT.LY/1VS2MQP TO REGISTER (INDICATE WHETHER YOU WILL
PARTICIPATE IN-PERSON OR REMOTELY)
PRESENTERS:
KATHERINE MCFATE, PRESIDENT & CEO, CENTER FOR EFFECTIVE GOVERNMENT
BRIAN GUMM, SENIOR ANALYST, CENTER FOR EFFECTIVE GOVERNMENT
GREG LEROY, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, GOOD JOBS FIRST
PHILIP MATTERA, RESEARCH DIRECTOR, GOOD JOBS FIRST
ROBERT WEISSMAN, PRESIDENT, PUBLIC CITIZEN
Background
Reduce Our Risks is a campaign to expose the unnecessary risks posed by the chemical
industry to the health and safety of American workers in chemical facilities, to the residents of
nearby communities, and to those who consume products with untested and potentially harmful
ingredients. This is the third in a series of five planned reports. Blowing Smoke on Community
Health and Safety: Is Safety a Core Value of the Chemical Industry? examines the facilities with
the worst record of violating federal environmental and workplace safety standards, the
companies that own them, and what we can do to make our communities safer.
Violation Tracker is the first online database of corporate misconduct. The initial version being
released this month will cover some 100,000 entries involving environmental, health and safety
cases brought by EPA, OSHA, MSHA and ten other federal agencies since the beginning of
2010, as well as settlements negotiated on behalf of those agencies by the Justice Department
during that period. Cases from additional agencies involving financial, wage & hour, antitrust
and other categories of violations will be added in the future. Violation Tracker, which employs
the same proprietary parent-subsidiary matching system developed by Good Jobs First for its
Subsidy Tracker database, will include aggregated dollar penalty totals for more than 1,600
parent companies as well as the individual records. The database is a complement to the 70
Corporate Rap Sheets on major violators published by GJF’s Corporate Research Project,
whose mission is to provide research tools for those working on corporate accountability.
We hope you will join us for this important discussion. It will be a chance to hear from leaders
on corporate accountability and see the new Violation Tracker.
Yours truly,
Gary D. Bass
Bauman Foundation
Robert Shull
Public Welfare Foundation