The Feeble War on Corporate America : Regulations: In 1994, there were a mere 250 criminal prosecutions against businesses in the U.S.-- hardly a barrage.

With the enthusiastic backing of the National Assn. of Manufacturers and a number of other business organizations, the Republican Congress has begun an organized attack on what it claims are the unnecessary and abusive regulatory programs of the federal government.

In the face of this antiregulatory barrage, President Clinton has indicated that he is opposed to at least some of the Republican proposals. While he thus has not bought into the full sweep of the Republican party’s war on regulation, the Administration’s on-going efforts to reinvent and downsize federal agencies inevitably means that many programs intended to protect the public will be eliminated or reduced.

Curiously, given the decibel level of the debate, the participants--corporations, environmental groups, unions, Congress or the Clinton administration --have not sought to support their varied arguments by determining what the federal government is actually doing today to protect the health and safety of the American people.

One explanation for this failure is that measuring the regulatory enforcement effort is not easy. The National Assn. of Manufacturers tries to suggest that the government’s effort is vast by citing the number of pages of regulations now on the books. But the mere existence of printed regulations and statutes is a poor indicator of the regulatory burden. It fails, in part, because laws that are seldom enforced may be ignored.

A second explanation for the dearth of hard information is related to the complexity of the American regulatory system. Over the years, Congress has passed dozens of environmental, occupational health and consumer product laws authorizing hundreds of different administrative, civil and criminal sanctions.

On the basis of these statutes, agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Food and Drug Administration publish regulations. When it is discovered that a corporation has violated one of these administrative rules, relatively small penalties sometimes are proposed. Where the agency finds a truly serious violation, perhaps involving the loss of life, there is a much more unpleasant option: Ask the Justice Department to bring criminal charges against the offending parties.

Corporate America hates criminal prosecutions, partly because such court actions become known to the media and can become public relations nightmares. In the worst situations, they can result in someone going to prison.

Because the regulatory agencies go about their business in independent ways and maintain records of their enforcement actions on different computer systems, it is extraordinarily difficult to obtain an accurate count of administrative enforcement actions.

But because the Justice Department is the central funnel through which all federal criminal prosecutions must flow, it is possible to obtain data tapes showing how many times criminal charges were brought for violations of the scores of environmental, occupational and consumer laws.

During fiscal year 1994, the Justice Department, which encompasses the offices of the 93 U.S. Attorneys, prosecuted 51,253 individuals. It is hardly major news that the largest single category of these indictments were drug law violations. What is more surprising, given the heated rhetoric of Republicans in Congress, is that the central focus of their concern is actually one of the smallest categories of crime.

In 1994, the Justice Department’s 4,000 prosecutors, working with the thousands of trained investigators of the FBI, the EPA, FDA, OSHA and other regulatory agencies, brought criminal cases against just 250 individuals where the lead charge concerned serious violations of the environmental, occupational health and consumer laws. This total represented a little less than half of one percent of all the prosecutions brought last year by the federal government.

It is, of course, impossible to estimate how frequently corporate America violates the criminal provisions of the environmental, health and consumer laws. But in a country the size of the United States with hundreds of thousands of business organizations, some number of which over the years have demonstrated their willingness to cut corners in a serious way, it is ludicrous to contend that the federal government is engaged in an overheated war on corporate America. With only 250 notches in the Justice Department’s 1994 belt, the conclusion must be the opposite: The federal government is in many ways soft on business and some executives may literally be getting away with murder.