DOJ bolsters resources to crack down on sanctions evasion, export control breaches
‘From terrorist financing, sanctions evasion, and export control circumvention to cybercrime and crypto-enabled crime, sophisticated white-collar criminals are contributing to global instability and threatening US national security to a degree never seen before.’
So said US Deputy Attorney General Marshall Miller in remarks to the New York Bar Association’s International White Collar Crime Symposium, 28 November, also noting that there are now also ‘national security dimensions in more familiar areas of corporate crime – intellectual property theft and international corruption, for example, interrupt supply chains, divert disruptive technologies to dark places, and fuel the misdeeds of rogue nation-states.’
He said that to meet the new challenges, the Department of Justice (‘DOJ’) is adding more than 25 new corporate crime prosecutors to its National Security Division and increasing by 40 percent the number of prosecutors in the Criminal Division’s Bank Integrity Unit, which prosecutes violations of US sanctions and the Bank Secrecy Act by financial institutions and executives.
The DOJ is modernizing its corporate enforcement programme by targeting efforts to the most important white-collar cases. ‘That includes charging the most culpable corporate executives, no matter how high they rank on the company org chart – and taking those cases to trial on an increasingly frequent basis,’ Miller said.
He added that the DOJ is also providing incentives for good corporate compliance, including through its Voluntary Self-Disclosure (‘VSD’) policies, explaining that for the first time, all 94 US Attorneys’ Offices have now adopted a single Voluntary Self-Disclosure policy that applies across the United States.
‘The VSD policies also ensure that companies that invest in effective compliance programs that enable swift identification of misconduct of which the government was not aware, then step up and own up by promptly self-reporting and remediating that misconduct, will fare better – in some cases by qualifying for a declination of prosecution,’ he said.
