A clear pattern has emerged in Justice Department corporate enforcement over the past several months, and it is worth compliance officers and general counsel taking notice: companies are being charged far less often, even in cases where prosecutors believed executives or managers were personally involved in the underlying wrongdoing, and that reduced corporate exposure has not been matched by a corresponding increase in individual prosecutions.

The Pattern

In recent matters involving Alibaba, EagleBank, and Abbott Laboratories, the Department declined to charge the companies at all, despite internal disagreement among prosecutors about whether felony charges were warranted. Instead, companies are being given non-prosecution or deferred prosecution agreements, oftentimes including a monetary payment. In the case of Abbott, DOJ resolved allegations of tainted baby formula production by closing the investigation without charging the company.

Notably, the Department also declined to charge any individuals in some of these matters. DOJ continues to emphasize its focus on prosecution of individuals responsible for criminal conduct. This has been evident in various prosecutions.

In a number of serious cases, DOJ insisted on the company pleading guilty — a total of 50 companies have had to plead guilty to a criminal offense in the last five years. Thesse high-profile cases resulted in guilty pleas from companies such as Goldman Sachs, TD Bank, and Allianz. This year, only 12 companies have pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges, while at least six, including Phillips 66 and Stericycle, have instead resolved matters through deferred prosecution agreements.

The Administration’s Rationale

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has articulated the Department’s focus on individual accountability. In a speech in December 2025, Blanch explained that prosecuting companies is not a goal by itself — noting that “Companies don’t go to jail, people do.” According to DOJ AAG for the Criminal Division Tysen Duva has stated that “all corporate cases that the department resolved this year were done so in a public fashion and were driven by the facts, the evidence, and the law, not a preference for any particular outcome.”

Where the Individual Accountability Argument Breaks Down

The stated rationale, that leniency toward companies should be paired with a sharper focus on individual accountability, has not been followed in some cases. The Department gave a deferred prosecution agreement in January 2026 to the CEO of AiNET, a technology contractor accused of defrauding the SEC using fabricated third-party certification letters to secure a $10.7 million data center contract. This month, prosecutors suspended the prosecution of three former Austal executives who had been facing fraud charges tied to the shipbuilder’s 2024 guilty plea for securities fraud and obstructing a Defense Department audit, recommending instead that the men be diverted into a first-time offender program that allows the charges to be dismissed entirely. And the Department dropped its long-running prosecution of Turkish state lender Halkbank over alleged Iran sanctions evasion, and, in 2024, dropped charges against Boeing in favor of a $243 million fine and a nonprosecution agreement, despite Boeing having previously been on track to plead guilty over conduct tied to the 737 MAX crashes.

What Got Companies Out of Charges

The details of the Alibaba and EagleBank resolutions are instructive on how far the leniency extends even where the underlying facts are serious. In the Alibaba matter, some prosecutors reportedly wanted felony charges under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and the Controlled Substances Act, and believed a guilty plea was warranted. Alibaba ultimately admitted to processing more than $200 million in illicit sales of pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and equipment such as pill presses usable in illegal drug manufacturing, agreeing to pay $325 million in fines and forfeiture under a nonprosecution agreement rather than face charges.

EagleBank’s nonprosecution agreement, resolved last month, involved admissions that the bank allowed a favored client, whose father was a business partner of the bank’s then-CEO, to write checks without sufficient funds to cover them, approved that client for a federally guaranteed loan after a top lending officer had ruled it unsound, and backdated the client’s loan payments to make them appear timely. Despite this fact pattern, involving apparent insider favoritism and falsified records, the bank was neither charged nor required to plead guilty.

Compliance Takeaways

This shift has real implications for how compliance officers should be advising their organizations, even amid a lighter federal enforcement environment.

Reduced corporate charging risk is not the same as reduced individual risk, and it should not be communicated to the organization that way. Boards and executives who read headlines about DOJ leniency toward companies may draw the wrong conclusion about their own personal exposure, particularly since the administration has said individual accountability is now the stated priority even where the recent track record does not fully bear that out.

Nonprosecution and deferred prosecution agreements still require admissions of wrongdoing, substantial fines, and often leadership and compliance changes. Leniency from criminal charges is not the same as a clean bill of health, and the underlying admitted conduct in cases like Alibaba and EagleBank remains a serious reputational and civil liability exposure regardless of the criminal outcome.

Enforcement philosophy shifts with administrations, but the underlying statutes, the Bank Secrecy Act, the FDCA, the Controlled Substances Act, securities laws, do not change. Conduct that escapes prosecution in this environment remains exposed to a future administration with a different enforcement posture, as well as to civil litigation, private plaintiffs, and state-level enforcement that operates independently of DOJ’s charging decisions.

Boards should not read this trend as license to relax internal escalation and governance controls. The EagleBank fact pattern, where senior executives allegedly overrode internal controls to protect a personal relationship, is exactly the kind of governance failure that remains a serious problem internally even when it does not result in criminal charges for the company or its executives.