More than $55 billion in fines and settlements added by SCCE to its 2015 Corporate Scandal Calendar

“We developed the SCALENDAR to help compliance and ethics officers looking for a way to engage employees and show them the consequence of non compliance,” said SCCE CEO Roy Snell. “We never imagined we would see this level of fines and settlements.”

More SCALENDAR details

The vast majority of the penalties chronicled arose directly from the mortgage meltdown. But there were substantial penalties elsewhere as well. The Pharmaceutical industry saw $2.8 billion in penalties added, and Foreign Corrupt Practices Act settlements accounted for $1.1 billion.

“These are enormous numbers, but they represent only a piece of the pie,” said Snell. “We only sought to include the large, headline grabbing incidents that people would be more familiar with. There were countless other incidents that we didn’t include.”

Also remarkable in the numbers were the penalties levied on the financial sector outside of the mortgage crisis. “We added just under $9 billion in settlements in cases ranging from the LIBOR case, to racial bias to credit card marketing this year.”

According to Snell there are two key lessons to be taken from the SCALENDAR. “First, the costs of non-compliance far exceed the cost of compliance.  No business today can justify not having an ethics and compliance program. Second, anyone who says compliance is expensive hasn’t tallied the likely costs of a compliance failure.”

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