The US Department of Justice (DoJ) under President Donald Trump is reviewing whether to eliminate corporate monitorships, as reported by the Financial Times.
Monitorships, which proliferated after corporate scandals like WorldCom and Enron, require companies to hire independent firms to oversee compliance after criminal settlements. "A priority for the DoJ is to re-evaluate all ongoing criminal division monitorships — and to decide what to do across the board," a defense attorney told the FT. "Potential options include eliminating monitorships, paring them back, or having the DoJ supervise them more closely."
Critics argue the move risks enabling misconduct to continue undetected. "If you have a company that's been engaged in severe and pervasive misconduct, the risk is that they won't fix it," said Veronica Root Martinez, a Duke University law professor. Recent actions show the shift: the DoJ allowed Glencore to end its monitorship 15 months early and has delayed starting Raytheon's monitorship following a $950 million settlement.
The review coincides with Trump's broader rollback of Biden-era white-collar enforcement, including halting the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and disbanding crypto and sanctions task forces. Meanwhile, Binance, which pleaded guilty to sanctions violations, has sought to end its Treasury monitorship.
In a Weekend Reading article published last September, Starling Founder & CEO Stephen Scott examined the prevailing reliance on corporate monitorship as a means to assess and resolve 'culture problems' like those that have arisen at Boeing. This approach, he argued, is not fit for purpose and prioritizes performative value over demonstrative progress.
In another Weekend Reading article published earlier this year, Scott reviewed research by Todd Haugh, of the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, and Hui Chen, a former Compliance Counsel Expert at the DoJ, on how monitorships could be reformed to bring about lasting culture change in monitored companies more successfully.
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