Governmental incentives for corporate self-regulation

This article presents an overview of traditional legal and regulatory incentives directed at achieving lawful corporate behavior, together with examples of more recent governmental incentives aimed at encouraging self regulation activities by corporations. These incentives have been differentiated into "positive" incentives that benefit corporations for actions that encourage or assist lawful behavior, and "punitive" incentives that only punish corporations for violations of legal or regulatory standards. This analysis indicates that traditional legal and regulatory incentives for lawful corporate behavior are overwhelmingly punitive in their intended effects, while more recent governmental incentives to encourage voluntary corporate self-regulation are much more positive in their intended effects. A prototype private compliance system containing typical features specified in governmental incentives for corporate self-regulation was then analyzed applying the same positive/punitive analysis that was performed with the governmental incentives. This analysis suggests that corporate compliance programs that are structured to comply with Department of Defense regulations for defense contractors or the new Federal Organizational Sentencing Guidelines will reflect the same overwhelmingly "punitive" balance of incentives for lawful and ethical employee conduct as do the traditional legal and regulatory incentive systems for lawful corporate behavior. Finally, the question of whether governmental incentives for corporate self-regulation are succeeding was investigated by examining the behavior of the Fortune 1000 companies in enacting or revising corporate codes of conduct, an essential feature of every governmental-encouraged system for corporate self-regulation, during the period 1960 to 1994. This data indicates a dramatic growth in the enactment of voluntary corporate codes of conduct by the Fortune 1000 companies in the period 1985-1994 that broadly parallels the growth in positive governmental incentives for such programs. In addition, several dramatic increases in code enactment and revision activity that occurred, coincide with specific governmental incentives for private compliance programs offered during that period.