Organizational Guidelines and Compliance

Proposed Amendments to Chapter Eight, Submitted to Congress May 1, 2004; anticipated effective date, November 1, 2004.

Ad Hoc Advisory Group on Organizational Guidelines.

An Overview of the Organizational Sentencing Guidelines.

Organizational Sentencing Practices - Selected excerpts from the U.S. Sentencing Commission's Annual Reports and Sourcebooks of Federal Sentencing Statistics (Fiscal Years 1995-2002).

CHAPTER EIGHT - SENTENCING OF ORGANIZATIONS - Federal Sentencing Guidelines Manual and Appendices (2003). This manual contains the federal sentencing guidelines and policy statements effective November 1, 2003.

Supplementary Report on Sentencing Guidelines for Organizations (August 30, 1991). This Supplementary Report on Sentencing Guidelines for Organizations supplements and further explains the sentencing guidelines for organizational defendants (proposed Chapter Eight of the Guidelines Manual) submitted to Congress on May 1, 1991, as Amendment 60, by the United States Sentencing Commission. (.PDF)

Organizational Sentencing Guidelines Bibliography (.PDF) A bibliography on the Organizational Sentencing Guidelines compiled by Commission staff, including treatises on Organizational Guidelines, reports and surveys, and articles on Organizational Guidelines. (March 2003)

The Honorable Diana E. Murphy, The Federal Sentencing Guidelines for Organizations: A Decade of Promoting Compliance and Ethics , 87 Iowa L. Rev. 697 (2002)

Recent conference paper by Vice Chair John R. Steer on the organizational sentencing guidelines.

John R. Steer, Changing Organizational Behavior -- The Federal Sentencing Guidelines Experiment Begins to Bear Fruit (unpublished paper presented at the Twenty-Ninth Annual Conference on Value Inquiry, Tulsa, Oklahoma (Apr. 26, 2001)). In this paper, John R. Steer, Vice Chair of the United States Sentencing Commission, and former General Counsel to the Commission, spotlights the system of sentencing guidelines for organizational defendants and discusses how their application to convicted organizations, as well as their threatened application to other potential law breakers, provides a novel and ambitious approach to punishment. This approach combines the threat of heavy criminal fines for law violators and the likelihood of court-supervised probation (the "sticks"), with the opportunity for very substantial fine mitigation (and perhaps no probation) (the "carrots") for those convicted entities who either have instituted an "effective program to prevent and detect violations of law," or who promptly report their wrongdoing and fully cooperate with law enforcement.

Corporate Crime Symposium (Sept. 7-8, 1995) Proceedings Book (.PDF) This volume contains the proceedings of the Commission’s second symposium in a series on crime and punishment. This symposium on corporate crime focused on the ways in which companies, industries, and enforcement officials have responded to the organizational sentencing guidelines’ incentives and other changes in the enforcement landscape that encourage businesses to develop strong compliance programs.

Report from Advisory Group on Environmental Sanctions (.PDF) (12/93) This 1993 draft of proposed sanctions for organizations convicted of environmental offenses was prepared by an independent Advisory Working Group on Environmental Offenses. The proposal concerns the determination of aggravating factors in sentencing, organizational commitment to environmental compliance, and probationary periods for organizations.

Food and Drug Working Group Final Report (2/95) This update to a February 1994 report includes an overview of the food and drug guideline, §2N2.1, and the most commonly prosecuted crimes sentenced under it. The report provides a description and analysis of food and drug cases involving individuals sentenced under §2N2.1 in fiscal years 1991-93, and describes food and drug cases involving organizational defendants sentenced under pre-guidelines law.

Organizations Sentencing Guidelines: Questions and Answers (1991) (.PDF) Incorporating statistical tables, this document lists the most commonly asked questions about the sentencing of organizations.