Work And The Meaning Of Life
New Free Tools to Track Corporate Misconduct Around the World
Global Investigative Journalism Network: “Large corporations often quietly pay individual fines for environmental, financial, or labor abuses without reporters noticing, or have patterns of misconduct that can be hard to quantify or easily missed. Sometimes, smaller companies will pay regulatory penalties without journalists realizing that they are subsidiaries controlled by influential parent companies or billionaires. “
[VT Global] is a way to see how the biggest companies you’re writing about are behaving, and what their record really is like in smaller countries.” — Siobhan Standaert, Violations Tracker research analyst But several free tools now track and aggregate penalties for corporate misconduct in an ever-growing total of 59 countries around the world, offering investigative reporters both authoritative details and abuse patterns at a glance, and easy ways to poke holes in greenwashing or public relations-polished claims about good governance.
Developed by the Corporate Research Project at the US-based NGO Good Jobs First, the flagship Violation Tracker database now includes 684,000 penalties and settlements involving 450 federal and state regulatory agencies in the United States, going back to 2000.
These include bad corporate behavior ranging from wage theft to anti-competitive practices and illegal polluting activities, and are often relevant to both domestic and international investigations due to the large number of multinational firms operating in the US. The project also features an almost-as-detailed database for the United Kingdom — Violation Tracker UK (VT UK) — featuring 117,000 cases resolved by 80 agencies since 2010.
However, a workshop at the recent NICAR 2025 data journalism summit in the US revealed that the project has launched a much broader Violation Tracker Global (VT Global) portal, which offers less comprehensive but nonetheless unique and valuable data on corporate misconduct from 57 additional countries and territories. “Right now, it covers 1,700 parent companies in those countries, and data going back to 2010,” explained Siobhan Standaert, a research analyst for the project. “It is not as robust as Violation Tracker; it’s a lot of countries to cover, where disclosure is often worse, and companies are exposed in many different ways.
But it is a way to see how the biggest companies you’re writing about are behaving, and what their record really is like in smaller countries.” (There is an explainer on the differences between the three datasetsand an updates log of when new sources are add..”
