Company Cooperation and U.S. Sentencing Guidelines

2019 ◽  
pp. 665-670
Author(s):  
Andrew Boutros

The U.S. Sentencing Commission has changed how the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines calculate fines for certain defendant companies. The amendments, effective November 1, 2010, make more readily available a long-standing three-level offense-level reduction. This change shifts the inquiry away from (1) the (mis)conduct of the company’s high-level personnel and toward (2) the effectiveness of the company’s compliance and ethics program. This move will surely benefit corporate defendants. Therefore, it is something for which compliance professionals and in-house legal counsel need to both understand and prepare. As the benefits of incentivizing companies to adopt proactive compliance, ethics, and self-reporting programs gain wider recognition, other countries eager to beef up their anti-bribery efforts can be expected to follow suit.

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abe Joseph Zakhem

<p><em>More than ever, businesses are called upon to manage organizational ethics programs. There are, as of yet, no internationally accepted guidelines for doing so. Some find in the U.S. Federal Sentencing Guidelines a framework that fits this need (Palmer &amp; Zakhem, 2001; Izraeli &amp; Schwartz, 1998; Jackson, 1997). As they stand, the Guidelines offer little insight as to what constitutes “ethical conduct.” This in itself is not a problem. Indeed, the question of what business ethics demand is for the most part an “open” question and one that should be regularly revisited to better understand and properly act on changing stakeholder demands (Freeman, 2008). What does constitute a problem, however, is that the Guidelines offer no suggestions as to how an organization ought to work through, in a morally acceptable way, inevitable stakeholder conflict over what is good and right. Following Jürgen Habermas’s insights on discourse ethics, this paper states that the lack of a substantive and discursive procedural ethic threatens ethics program effectiveness. This article expands upon these claims and offers some thoughts about the mutually beneficial role that discourse ethics can and ought to play in effective ethics program management.</em></p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (025) ◽  
pp. 1-59
Author(s):  
Leland D. Crane ◽  
◽  
Ryan A. Decker ◽  
Aaron Flaaen ◽  
Adrian Hamins-Puertolas ◽  
...  

Lags in official data releases have forced economists and policymakers to leverage "alternative" or "non-traditional" data to measure business exit resulting from the COVID- 19 pandemic. We first review official data on business exit in recent decades to place the alternative measures of exit within historical context. For the U.S., business exit is countercyclical and fairly common, with about 7.5 percent of firms exiting annually in recent years. Both the high level and the cyclicality of exit are driven by very small firms and establishments. We then explore a range of alternative measures of business exit, including novel measures based on paycheck issuance and phone-tracking data, which indicate exit was elevated in certain sectors during the first year of the pandemic. The evidence is mixed, however; many industries have likely seen lower-than-usual exit rates, and exiting businesses do not appear to represent a large share of U.S. employment. Actual exit is likely to have been lower than widespread expectations from early in the pandemic. Moreover, businesses have recently exhibited notable optimism about their survival prospects.


Author(s):  
Dr. Simon Hudson ◽  
Louise Hudson

Winter sport activities. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the focus of this book is on the winter sports of skiing and snowboarding, and as previously noted, there are approximately 120 million ski and snowboarders worldwide, with nearly a third of those coming from Western Europe. Figure 2.1 shows the distribution of skiers and boarders by region of origin. The share of international visitors is less than one sixth of partici- pants, with the international flow of skiers and boarders primarily restricted to Europe. Overseas visitors in the U.S., for example, represented just 3.8 per cent of total skier visits in 2012/13. Although some countries have very few ski areas, they are still, like the Netherlands and the U.K., significant outbound markets, sending around one million skiers and boarders each to the mountains every winter. France, Germany, Japan and the U.S. have the biggest domestic ski and snowboard markets, each numbering between 11.5 and 13 million people. In terms of inbound visits, Austria leads the way, with over 34 million, followed by France with 15 million and Switzerland with 13.8 million. Meanwhile, countries with a high level of participation rates amongst domestic populations include Switzerland (37%), Austria (36%), Norway (25%), and Finland (24%). Interestingly, only 4.3 per cent of the population in the U.S. takes to the mountains each winter. Table 2.1 lists the countries that receive over one million skier visits, along with participation rates as a percentage of their population.


1985 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 1079-1081 ◽  
Author(s):  
H.-H. MÜNDEL ◽  
H. C. HUANG ◽  
L. D. BURCH ◽  
F. KIEHN

Saffire is the first Canadian cultivar of safflower (Carthamus tinctorius L.). It has early maturity, with seed yields exceeding those of the U.S. cultivar S-208 by 10% and equal to those of the Montana-bred cultivar Hartman, and has a high level of resistance to sclerotinia head rot. The shiny whitish seed pericarp and low oil levels make Saffire suitable mainly for the birdseed market. Saffire is adapted to the drier southern regions of the prairie provinces.Key words: Carthamus tinctorius L., safflower, cultivar description


Author(s):  
Yousef Abdulsalam ◽  
Dari Alhuwail ◽  
Eugene S. Schneller

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has recently mandated that medical device manufacturers adopt Unique Device Identification (UDI) standards on their medical devices. The benefits that UDI brings to hospitals and patients is relatively obvious, including inventory transparency, product safety, product equivalency, business intelligence. However, adoption by manufacturers, who face the mandate, has been slow in part because the benefit to them is not as readily perceived. This study focuses on the incentives, barriers, and benefits that medical device manufacturers perceive in UDI adoption. This study seeks to understand which adoption pressures are driving manufacturers to act, and attempts to gauge the benefits to manufacturers from UDI adoption. Through survey methods, the evidence suggests that medical device manufacturers implement UDI largely as a response to the coercive and normative pressures they face. There continues to be a high level of uncertainty regarding the return on investment for the medical device manufacturers, particularly from the late adopters.


2017 ◽  
Vol 99 (4) ◽  
pp. 72-73
Author(s):  
Joshua P. Starr

In the conclusion to her 2014 book The Teacher Wars, the journalist Dana Goldstein offers 11 recommendations for increasing the professional status of teachers in the U.S. Her suggestions — such as increasing teacher pay, supporting professional learning communities, and encouraging teachers to observe each other in the classroom — offer excellent starting points for high-level policy debates, says Joshua P. Starr. From the perspective of a local school superintendent, however, each of these ideas needs some refinement.


Author(s):  
Robert E. Prince ◽  
Bradley W. Bowan

This paper describes actual experience applying a technology to achieve volume reduction while producing a stable waste form for low and intermediate level liquid (L/ILW) wastes, and the L/ILW fraction produced from pre-processing of high level wastes. The chief process addressed will be vitrification. The joule-heated ceramic melter vitrification process has been used successfully on a number of waste streams produced by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). This paper will address lessons learned in achieving dramatic improvements in process throughput, based on actual pilot and full-scale waste processing experience. Since 1991, Duratek, Inc., and its long-term research partner, the Vitreous State Laboratory of The Catholic University of America, have worked to continuously improve joule heated ceramic melter vitrification technology in support of waste stabilization and disposition in the United States. From 1993 to 1998, under contact to the DOE, the team designed, built, and operated a joule-heated melter (the DuraMelterTM) to process liquid mixed (hazardous/low activity) waste material at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina. This melter produced 1,000,000 kilograms of vitrified waste, achieving a volume reduction of approximately 70 percent and ultimately producing a waste form that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) delisted for its hazardous classification. The team built upon its SRS M Area experience to produce state-of-the-art melter technology that will be used at the DOE’s Hanford site in Richland, Washington. Since 1998, the DuraMelterTM has been the reference vitrification technology for processing both the high level waste (HLW) and low activity waste (LAW) fractions of liquid HLW waste from the U.S. DOE’s Hanford site. Process innovations have doubled the throughput and enhanced the ability to handle problem constituents in LAW. This paper provides lessons learned from the operation and testing of two facilities that provide the technology for a vitrification system that will be used in the stabilization of the low level fraction of Hanford’s high level tank wastes.


2001 ◽  
Vol 84 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-736 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles B Bird ◽  
Rebecca J Hoerner ◽  
Lawrence Restaino ◽  
G Anderson ◽  
W Birbari ◽  
...  

Abstract Five different food types were analyzed by the Reveal for E. coli O157:H7 8-Hour Test System (Reveal 8) and either the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Bacteriological Analytical Manual (BAM) culture method or the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) culture method for the presence of E. coli O157:H7. A total of 27 laboratories representing academia and private industry in the United States and Canada participated. Food types were inoculated with E. coli O157:H7 at 2 different levels: a high level where predominantly positive results were expected, and a low level where fractional recovery was anticipated. During this study, 1110 samples and controls were analyzed by both the Reveal 8 and by BAM or FSIS by each of the collaborators (2220 samples in total). For each set of samples, 740 were artificially inoculated with E. coli O157:H7, and 370 were uninoculated controls. The Reveal 8 detected 528 presumptive positives of which 487 were confirmed positive by the BAM culture method. In comparison, BAM and FSIS detected 489 of the 740 artificially contaminated samples as positive. In an additional in-house study performed only on chilled and frozen raw ground beef, 240 artificially inoculated samples were analyzed by both the Reveal 8 and by FSIS. The Reveal 8 detected and confirmed 104 samples as positive compared to 79 confirmed positive by FSIS.


1975 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 104-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred W. Grupp ◽  
Allan R. Richards

“A recent survey of high-level, appointed executives in ten states reveals that they are very satisfied with their jobs. They rank their current occupation nearer to ‘ideal’ than did previously surveyed federal or business executives, and they prefer working for state government to employment with the federal government or in private business.”


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