Corporate Governance Regulation through Nonprosecution

Over the last decade, federal corporate criminal enforcement policy has undergone a significant transformation. Firms that commit crimes are no longer simply required to pay fines. Instead, prosecutors and firms enter into pretrial diversion agreements (PDAs). Prosecutors regularly use PDAs to impose mandates on firms, creating new duties that alter firms' internal operations or governance structures. DOJ policy favors the use of such mandates for any firm with a deficient compliance program at the time of the crime. This Article evaluates PDA mandates to determine when and how prosecutors should use them to deter corporate crime. We find that the current DOJ policy on mandates is misguided and that mandates should be imposed more selectively. Specifically, mandates are appropriate only if a firm is plagued by policing agency costs in that the firm's managers did not act to deter or report wrongdoing because they benefited personally from tolerating wrongdoing or from deficient corporate policing. Moreover, only mandates that are properly designed to reduce policing agency costs are appropriate.The policing agency cost justification for mandates that we develop calls into question both the extent to which mandates are used and the type of mandates that are imposed by prosecutors.