Companies with compliance programmes to get lighter sentences

Companies in the US which have implemented compliance programmes could see their penalties reduced if found guilty of white collar crime under a proposal being floated by the US Sentencing Commission.

The independent federal agency, which is charged with issuing guidelines to assist US judges during sentencing, has suggested that judges should take into consideration during sentencing whether companies have in place corporate compliance programmes designed to fight corruption, according to a report which appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

However, the proposal, which is being released by the commission as part of a public consultation exercise, will require that a company’s compliance officer to have direct access to its board of directors in order to qualify for the lenient treatment, the report said. The compliance officer must also be made responsible for detecting criminal activity in the organisation, and misconduct must be reported in a timely manner to the authorities.

If a company meets these requirements, it could qualify for lenient treatment even if its senior officers were involved in the misconduct, the report said.
William Sessions III, the agency’s chairman, said the idea behind the proposal is to foster direct communication between compliance officers and the corporate board of directors in companies, elevating the tackling of corruption and wrongdoing to the most senior levels of organisations.

He said it was designed to help companies obey the law, even if some of its corporate officers had not. “You are basically circumventing the people responsible for the illegal act,” he told the newspaper.

The proposal will now be discussed in a public hearing on March 18, with the commission expected to vote on it in April.