The incentive in compliance programs : : a legal comparative research on compliance programs incentivizing and whistleblowing regulation between the USA and Germany

Abstract: As our understanding progresses, it has come to light that corporate crimes ought to be proactively prevented in addition rather than just reactively punished, because the severe consequences of any corporate crime cannot be easily remedied by the aftermath punishment. For this reason, the concept compliance program came into being in the first place in the US as an internal crimes preventive tool implemented in a corporation. However, its advantage comes with a huge cost. Compliance programs are extremely expansive yet cannot provide corporations with imminent substantial gain. That’s why investigative authority usually has to offer corporations sentencing leniency in order to incentivize corporations for installing compliance programs. In addition, under the framework of compliance program, another concept whistleblowing is also important. In order to gather the internal information in a corporation to know whether a misconduct is or will take place, whistleblowers are extremely useful yet controversial. On one hand, they are valuable to criminal investigation. On the other hand, however, they are hated for betraying corporations and even retaliated for doing so.

The thesis conducts a comparative study on these two topics between the US and Germany with the intention to enlighten the future legislation of China. In the end, despite its limited contribution to the whistleblowing topic, the thesis reveals that corporate crimes’ emergence follows a clear development pattern across the US, Germany and China. It results from the global expansion of liberal market economy as a shift of paradigm from the previous state dominance over the economy. Nevertheless, corporate punishment failed to evolve with the time as the corporations did due to the establishment of well-developed stock exchange market. The latter transformed the corporate governance from ownership-centric to management-centric.

The implications and applications of the thesis are as follows: 1. Current corporate compliance rewarding mechanism based on punishment/sanction mitigation against corporations is fundamentally self-contradictory therefore cannot provide a corporation and its compliance program any meaningful incentive/reward. 2. The application of corporate punishment against corporate crimes nowadays has become outdated and shall argurably violate self-responsibility principle. 3. The emergence of corporate crimes can be attributed to the introduction and establishment of liberal market economy. The development of corporate crimes in the US, Germany and China repeated a similar trajectory.

Hence, based upon the analyses above, this thesis envisages the management criminal liability displacing corporate criminal liability as a global solution to punishing corporate crimes as well as incentivizing compliance programs

Object Details

• Location: Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Frankfurt am Main
• Extent: Online-Ressource
• Language: Englisch
• Notes: Universität Freiburg, Dissertation, 2020

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Recht
• Keyword: Compliance ; Programs ; Research

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (where): Freiburg
• (who): Universität
• (when): 2021
• Creator: Yuning, Ruiheng
• Contributor: Albrecht, Hans-Jörg ; Sieber, Ulrich ; Engelhart, Marc ; Max-Planck-Institut für Ausländisches und Internationales Strafrecht ; Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. Rechtswissenschaftliche Fakultät

Further information

• DOI: 10.6094/UNIFR/221621
• URN: urn:nbn:de:bsz:25-freidok-2216210
• Rights: Kein Open Access; Der Zugriff auf das Objekt ist unbeschränkt möglich.
• Last update: 25.03.2025, 1:53 PM CET