Compliance & Ethics

There are few assets as carefully protected as the right to call yourself an Olympic sponsor. Companies spend years negotiating for that privilege and millions securing it. Others, seeing the attention the Games inevitably command, sometimes try a less expensive route, such as standing close enough to borrow the glow without ever paying for the light. Italy's competition regulator has decided that six companies crossed that line.

The Department of Justice's Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs contains a question that would have sounded almost eccentric a generation ago. Prosecutors are instructed to ask whether a company has measured its culture. Not whether it published a code of conduct polished to a corporate sheen, nor whether employees dutifully completed another round of ethics training before the deadline, but whether the organization possesses evidence, actual evidence, about the beliefs and behaviors that determine what happens after the policy manual closes and the meeting adjourns.

Laboratory testing is supposed to answer a medical question. The Justice Department says one of Labcorp's testing panels answered another as well: how to bill Medicare. The laboratory diagnostics company has agreed to pay $14.5 million to resolve allegations that it submitted false claims to Medicare Part B for medically unnecessary urine drug testing performed through a panel marketed as ToxAssure Comprehensive.

A bipartisan coalition of 49 attorneys general has secured more than $29 million from Glenmark Pharmaceuticals to resolve allegations that the company participated in a long-running scheme to inflate the prices of generic prescription drugs, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced Wednesday.

The Department of Justice announced Wednesday that New York Packaging, which does business as Redi-Bag, and its chief executive, have agreed to resolve allegations that they falsely declared the country of origin of imported polyethylene retail carrier bags, allowing the company to avoid antidumping duties owed to the United States.

The Dutch central bank has fined payment institution CCV Netherlands €2.65 million after finding that deficiencies in its transaction monitoring system persisted for more than two years, leaving thousands of merchant profiles improperly processed and potentially suspicious activity inadequately examined. De Nederlandsche Bank announced the penalty Monday, saying CCV failed to adequately and continuously monitor transactions as required under the Netherlands’ Anti-Money Laundering and Anti-Terrorist Financing Act, known by its Dutch abbreviation, Wwft.

Edwards Lifesciences paid $115 million for JC Medical in July 2024, an amount that landed just beneath the $119.5 million threshold that would have required the transaction to be reported to federal antitrust authorities. It was close, but close does not count in a statute governed by arithmetic. The Federal Trade Commission says the math was incomplete.