These Are The 10 Companies With The Biggest Fines Of 2018

Pay day loan companies.

Life insurance companies.

Professional hit(wo)men companies.

When someone asks what you think of as a corrupt, illegal, or consumer unfriendly company, these kinds of companies spring to mind. And while being the target of a hit is probably a lot worse than having to deal with a manager’s manager’s manager at a big insurance company, I’d say there’s a minimal difference.

So we took it upon ourselves to identify which companies and industries go out of their way to cause all of us the most pain and suffering (outside of dentists which we technically pay for the pleasure of going to). Specifically, those companies that had to pay the most in fines during 2018.

To do so we looked at the most recent data from Good Jobs First Violation Tracker. They have a pretty straightforward description of their project and sources of data:

“Violation Tracker is the first national search engine on corporate misconduct. It covers banking, consumer protection, false claims, environmental, wage & hour, unfair labor practice, health, safety, employment discrimination, price-fixing, bribery and other cases initiated by more than 40 federal regulatory agencies and all divisions of the Justice Department since 2000”.

We pulled the data for all of 2018 and aggregated “Penalty Amount” to the parent company level in order to identify the companies that paid the most in fines:

1. Royal Bank of Scotland ($4,900,750,000)
2. Wells Fargo ($3,122,608,441)
3. Barclays ($2,000,000,000)
4. ZTE ($1,400,000,000)
5. Societe Generale ($1,329,126,916)
6. HSBC ($866,600,000)
7. AmerisourceBergen ($625,000,000)
8. U.S. Bancorp ($617,400,000)
9. Verizon Communications ($614,300,000)
10. Citigroup ($475,797,475)

All in all, the companies in Good Jobs First database paid out an outlandish $22,727,958,383 in fines in 2018 with these top ten companies paying out $15,951,582,832 — or about 70% of the total amount.

Forget about the 80/20 rule, this is the 70 / 0.00008 rule.

You can find a detailed breakdown by industry, agency, and company below.

Summary Of Findings

• Royal Bank of Scotland, the most fine-laden company of 2018, managed to pay for Trump’s border wall in fines — $4,900,750,000
• 7 out of the top 10 companies are banks. And here I thought dentists were the worst people.
• *Financial Services, Telecommunications, and Healthcare Services were the three largest industries by fine amount.
• *Mining and minerals (500), retailing (148), and building materials (141) were the three largest industries by number of fines.
• The biggest collector of fines was the Justice Department Civil Division
• The Occupational Safety & Health Administration brought the most fines — 10,034