DECEMBER 1998 · VOLUME 19· NUMBER 12

For what seems an eternity, Washington, D.C. has been abuzz with talk of perjury and obstruction of justice.

Not so surprisingly, the politicians and talking heads have failed to broaden their discussion to cover the category of perjury and obstruction of justice with important consequences -- rampant corporate lying under oath and interference with law enforcement.

The most prominent example occurred four and a half years ago, when tobacco company executives appeared before a committee of the House of Representatives and mocked the members of Congress by testifying under oath that they did not believe that nicotine is addictive. Documents since made public show that the companies have known of nicotine's addictiveness for decades -- and have based marketing strategies on tobacco's addictive quality.

More important is Big Tobacco's decades-long conspiracy to lie to federal and state agencies about cigarette's health effects and addictiveness. That has interfered with and prevented efforts to regulate the tobacco industry, at a potential cost of perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives.

Lying and obstruction of justice is not limited to the pariah tobacco industry.

Consider the coal industry. In 1991, then-Secretary of Labor Lynn Martin announced a stunning pattern and practice of coal company cheating on dust sampling tests. More than 500 mine operators had submitted coal dust monitoring cassettes which displayed "abnormal white centers," suggesting they had been vacuumed. These tests are designed to ensure that miners are not exposed to unsafe levels of coal dust, the cause of debilitating and deadly black lung disease. Efforts to prosecute the companies floundered, because in each individual case the companies were able to argue that the abnormal white centers may have been the result of mishandling of the cassettes -- but no one was really fooled as to what took place.

Then, in April 1998, in a stunning series in the Louisville Courier-Journal, reporter Gardiner Harris documented even more conclusively that cheating on the tests continues. The paper examined coal dust sampling records and found that, in fiscal year 1997, 80 percent of the nation's underground mines submitted air samples that were impossibly clean. Harris supplemented the statistical analysis with interviews with foremen and workers who described how the coal companies cheated on the dust sampling tests. "I was told by the superintendent or the owner to see to it that the dust pumps was turned off," one typical foreman told Harris. "I turned off the machines myself where I was a foreman."

There are countless other examples of known corporate lying and obstruction of justice. To mention only a few prominent U.S. cases from 1998:

• Hudson Foods (now owned by Tyson Foods) was indicted in December for lying to the U.S. Department of Agriculture in an effort to delay recall of 25 million pounds of hamburger meat, some of it infected by E.coli, in 1997.
  
  
• Seven heavy duty diesel engine makers entered into a $1 billion civil settlement in October to resolve Justice Department allegations that they equipped their engines with software that allowed the engines to pass emissions tests but turned off pollution control equipment under normal driving conditions. The engine makers still proclaim their innocence.
  
  
• Even so apparently harmless a company as Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines has recently been caught in a web of lies. Not only did the company illegally dump oil waste in the Gulf of Mexico, it destroyed physical evidence related to the crime and presented a doctored log book to conceal the discharges [see "Corporate Bullies," this issue].

For two reasons, no one knows how extensive is corporate lying and obstruction of justice. Relatively few law enforcement resources in the United States are directed to investigating and prosecuting corporate crime, so corporate perjury and obstruction of justice is massively underprosecuted. And, there is no U.S. national collection of corporate crime data, no analogue to the federal crime database for street crime, which generates reams of data and enables police to check quickly on prior convictions of criminal suspects.

These shortcomings point the way to a citizens' agenda for cracking down on corporate crime: First, beef up the budgets and strengthen the authority of the cops on the corporate crime beat -- regulatory agencies and federal, state and local prosecutors. Along with bigger budgets, these agencies need stronger sanctions -- higher fines, plus the ability to impose innovative terms of probation, the authority to withdraw corporate lawbreakers' right to bid for government contracts and other creative sanctions.

Second, the federal government should immediately establish a centralized federal database on corporate crime and violence.

A third prong of the citizens' agenda should be new statutes and rules that empower citizens themselves to take on corporate perjury and obstruction, and other crimes. Citizens should have standing to enforce health, safety, environmental and financial laws against corporate wrongdoers; and bounties should reward those who provide information about corporate lying and obstruction, and those who successfully bring cases against corporate lawbreakers.

Unfortunately, there is no faction in Congress nor an independent counsel to press the agenda for redress of corporate perjury and obstruction of justice. Only a mobilized citizenry can place it on the congressional dockets.