Insights

Washington – August 17, 2023: The 2024 edition of The Best Lawyers in America® has recognized 47 firm lawyers as "Best Lawyers" and 41 lawyers as “Ones to Watch.”

Washington – February 27, 2023: Global Investigations Review has named Crowell & Moring’s Investigations and White Collar & Regulatory Enforcement groups to its prestigious GIR 100 list, an annual guide to the world’s leading cross-border investigations practices. Based on extensive research, GIR selects 100 firms from around the world that it deems most able to handle sophisticated cross-border government-led and internal investigations. This is the eighth consecutive year that Crowell & Moring has made the list.

On March 7, 2024, Deputy Attorney General (DAG) Lisa Monaco delivered remarks at the American Bar Association’s 39th National Institute on White Collar Crime announcing a new Department of Justice (DOJ) pilot program that incentivizes whistleblowers to report corporate misconduct by offering monetary rewards.  Likening the program to “the days of ‘Wanted’ posters across the Old West,” DAG Monaco explained that individuals who help DOJ discover otherwise unknown, “significant” corporate or financial crime could receive a portion of the resulting forfeiture.  This program will encourage whistleblowers to report a broad range of criminal activity by bridging the divide between DOJ’s priorities and other whistleblower mechanisms such as the False Claims Act’s qui tam provision (which is only available for fraud against the government), and programs at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and other federal agencies (which only cover misconduct within their respective jurisdictions).  By placing a bounty on corporate actors, this DOJ pilot program—which will be developed by the Department’s Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section (MLARS)—underscores the need for companies to take stock of their compliance programs and enhance their internal reporting infrastructure.    

On January 17, 2023, Kenneth A. Polite, Jr, Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice (DOJ)’s Criminal Division, delivered a speech at Georgetown Law School announcing the first significant changes to the Criminal Division’s Corporate Enforcement Policy (“CEP”) since 2017. The changes answer the call of Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco and provide companies with new and concrete incentives to self-disclose wrongdoing and meaningfully cooperate with DOJ investigations. Most notably, DOJ is offering both a new path to avoid prosecution, and, in cases where a criminal resolution is warranted, the opportunity to obtain as much as 75% off the low end of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines fine range. The revisions also include incentives for companies that do not voluntarily self-disclose, but still fully cooperate and remediate—even these companies can obtain a 50% reduction in fines.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced on April 19th the launch of the new Office of Promoter Investigations (OPI) aimed at enforcement against promoters of abusive tax transactions, such as syndicated conservation easements and micro-captive insurance schemes, and expanding on the work the promoter investigations coordinator has been pursuing for the past year. The new office is part of the IRS’s Small Business and Self-Employed Division (SB/SE) and will be led by acting director Lois Deitrich, an IRS exam official with over 20 years of experience. Although the office is housed within SB/SE, it will coordinate promoter investigations throughout all IRS business units, including Criminal Investigation and the Office of Fraud Enforcement.