"They have to go after regular people and small business owners because corporations have too many lawyers!"
> The IRS brings in more dollars per hour auditing small mom and pop businesses, than they do auditing medium and large companies.
> Why is that the case? Because the larger companies keep impeccable records and have tax experts to defend them; Enrolled Agents, CPAs, or tax attorneys that usually know more about the Tax Code than the IRS auditor-employee.
I've found it in my conversations with people justifying the recent increases in IRS agents and the new $600 reporting requirement.
You called it a fairy tale, do you believe that big corporations are actually bigger tax cheats than small businesses, and they're just getting away with it somehow?
Look at where we started.
Pfizer gets fined more beacuse they are a bigger company and have more surface area, the law is complex and everyone is breaking it all the time so action against them doesn't mean they did anything wrong. In and of itself fine, that may be true.
Then those same people will later say, the IRS went after that Mexican restaurant instead of Pfizer beacuse they are so big, and run such a tight ship that it would almost impossible to find any wrong doing.
The tax code is very complex, so is drug regulation. Is the idea that Pfizer is hyper competent in tax law but incompetent when it comes to the core business? That doesn't hold water for me.
At big corps, on the other hand, this type of activity is heavily policed and almost impossible. The idea that large corporations are rampant tax cheats is completely false. The reason that they would never dare is because the IRS has a whistleblower program where you get to keep a percentage of the proceeds, which at a big corp will be multiple millions of dollars. So any intentional tax cheating will be reported and caught immediately by employees who stand to gain more than their salary for their whole career.
The worst that a big corp will ever do is dip a toe into the legal gray areas of tax law. And in that case the IRS will be hesitant to go after them because it takes a ton of resources, and they stand a very high chance of losing. Not because the big corp has too many lawyers, but because the opposition has a legit case, unlike the small business owner who bought his engagement ring on the company card. The idea that anyone has too many lawyers for the government to handle is ridiculous anyway.
So it makes complete sense for the IRS to target small businesses and regular people and not big corps. But people don't like this because it goes against the "big corp bad, small business good" religious belief.
And yet, large corporations, especially banks, are continuously caught with blatant abuse of the tax code (e.g. the "cum ex" scandal in Germany, where banks outright looted the government) or their customers.
The problem is that the fines are way too low. What does a large corporation care about a fine of even a billion dollars? Spread out over the time of the violation, that's petty cash, and as long as the execs don't have to go to jail, D&O insurance will pay any personal punishments.
https://www.irs.gov/about-irs/irs-audit-rates-significantly-...
There is no article about it, but the same also holds for businesses. There are just soooo many more small to middle sized businesses compared to large corporations.
We like the headline of this article: megacorp pfizer is evil. That's why we're in this thread, right?
Kind of like 3 Felonies a Day, lots of times the laws/regulations are so labyrinthine that if they look at you closely, they will find something.
Shouldn't we expect to see similar behaviors across regulators?
Without having any knowledge of said people and laws, I would say that some of those smart people are making decisions to help their personal bottom line while putting the company at risk. Anyone working at a large company sees this all the time.
Perhaps they don't really care to? Apparently paying penalties is just a part of the business model, net profits/savings made thanks to the violations still exceeding net fines.
I'm not sure about Pfizer but I feel almost sure this is the way Google and other big tech corporations providing "free" services work paying huge fines for privacy violations every now and then. Google will still spies on you and records everything it can about you no matter how much do you tweak your settings and how hard does the EU try to protect your privacy rights, doesn't it?
A bit self-serving but there's some meat on the bones of that logic; the real meaning of the law is path-dependent and determined by the rulings, not the words on the paper.
Well. I looked the case up.
Here is how i am understanding it: Pfizer wanted a drug to be approved for a specific use. The FDA rejected it as too risky, approved it for other uses. Pfizer nevertheless was pushing the drug for this unaproved, off-label use. The drug later proved to be dangerous in this off-label use and were whitdrawn from the market.
Am I reading this wrong? What part of this is controversial?
If you ask for permission for something, then been told no you do it anyway and in that process people suffer harm what should happen then?
Physicians constantly ask pharma about and explore off label drug prescriptions. This is legal: psychiatrist can tell you to take a drug approved for nerve pain for depression. There is research showing it works for depression but it has not technically been added to the label of the drug yet following fda approval. Pharma can provide the studies and answer limited questions on the topic (but no clear guidance) but cannot "promote" this. Is presenting the research promotion? Is the rep discussing it with the doctor promotion? Etc
Now tell me what is “was promoted by pfizer”? A doctor saying it in a comment/presentation that he tried this with on patient and storing this on one of our digital platforms? It’s really grey water…
And add to this hard times for medical reps after covid.
Yes, and in other companies employees go through training when dealing these things to avoid any type of off label advertisement. It’s not “muddy” it’s like claiming lawyers think DUI is muddies waters because there is just so many things to consider. No one in their right mind in the industry would ever think that. And while the terminology is perhaps foreign to people not in the industry, everyone understands that you can’t just go out claiming that paracetamol cures cancer, no mater how good a business case you’ve made for additional sales.
> Pharma can provide the studies and answer limited questions on the topic
Sure and then get fined for off label marketing. The lines aren’t difficult to understand and they are way harsher than you seem to think. Something as behneighen as a rep liking a Facebook post covering a university article saying “paracetamol shows promise as cancer cure” is overstepping the line because the like can be interpreted as off label marketing.
They aren't. What is clear is that a huge corporation of smart people simply don't care about fines.
The answer is to make the fines much bigger, big enough that a single one would threaten the existence of Pfizer.
The fines should be tied to revenue and after some violations they should reach the point where the business cannot continue.
The US system is unique and we're entrenched. This is too big a change.
I was a small-time expert witness (on the plaintiff's side) against them in a very small lawsuit. It was the first and last time I served in that capacity.
A child was born with horrific birth defects. Parents claimed that a specific medication caused it. Pfizer obviously said otherwise.
The whole thing left me feeling dirty. Experts charging $600 / hour (this was over a decade ago, so God knows what they charge now) to say, with diamond-hard confidence, whatever their side wanted them to say.
Plaintiff's experts: "That drug _definitely_ caused the birth defects."
Defense experts: "There is no possible way that drug could cause birth defects."
Basically, here was a tragedy, and we all feasted on it. One of the other experts told me I could be "good at this" (selling myself out as an expert), but it just left me feeling dirty.
I would expect an Expert to study on the particulars of a case. In general as long as they are sufficiently narrow I don't see a problem here.
The court does not need to build a nuclear reactor. They need someone who can help the court understand nuclear.
Your theoretical person may be a bad choice if they have no communication skills.
There is a legal "standard" around the admissibility of expert testimony (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daubert_standard).
The person who got me to testify told me he made around $700 K per year. He drove a ~$200K Maybach so I had no reason to doubt him.
I also met a plaintiff's lawyer who told me, roughly, "If the lawsuit ever sees a jury, the jury never understands the science. It's all about likeability and looking good. I had a juror tell me, 'I picked your side because you had a really nice tie.' So, I always wear a nice tie!"
That was probably a hyperbolic story, but I'm sure there's a lot of truth to it, too.
My understanding is that it was messy. The parents/kid got some money. Maybe $1 - 1.5 million?? But my memory is hazy on that. Obviously, their parents' lawyer took some percentage of that.
I'm pretty sure the (parents') lawyer who hired me took on other plaintiff's lawyers as "investors" (I forget the proper term for what he did). Basically, he didn't have enough money to pay for everything up front [like expert witnesses], so he sold fractional "ownership" in his future earnings on the case in exchange for funds. This was a part of the business that I did not know existed prior to my testimony.
My suspicion is that he took away very little after the rest of us got paid (family, support staff, "investors", etc.).
My deposition was probably pretty typical, but it was shocking to me.
- The defense lawyers flew out to me and rented a conference room at a local law office.
- At around 9AM, the main defense lawyer sat across a table from me and pulled out stack after stack of documents and I thought, "Wow, she brought a lot of extra reading for herself. I should be done here by around 11 and I can go home and mow the lawn."
- NOPE! Every stack of documents was there to rebut some specific sentence that I wrote in my initial report.
- There were a lot of insults and efforts to get under my skin. For example, after I used some technical term, she said, "That's a big word. Do you really know what it means?"
- The only reason the deposition stopped was because she had to catch a flight back to the west coast around 5 PM.
- The kicker was that "MY" lawyer asked if I'd be willing to give them BOTH (plaintiff AND defense) a ride to the airport (defense lawyer said she'd pay me my rate for the ride).
- I told them I had to get home, but really I took the whole thing too personally because I thought, "You just insulted me for six-and-a-half hours? Now you want me to drive you to the airport? I'll pass."
- And then the lawyers took a taxi together like they were old friends.
Obviously, it's just business for them, but I'm not built for that.
During the mid-1980s, watchdog organizations such as the Public Citizen Health Research Group charged that Pfizer’s widely prescribed arthritis drug Feldene created a high risk of gastrointestinal bleeding among the elderly, but the federal government, despite reports of scores of fatalities, declined to put restrictions on the medication. A June 1986 article in The Progressive about Feldene was headlined DEATH BY PRESCRIPTION.
The Food and Drug Administration expressed greater concern about reports of dozens of fatalities linked to heart valves made by Pfizer’s Shiley division. In 1986, as the death toll reached 125, Pfizer ended production of all models of the valves. Yet by that point they were implanted in tens of thousands of people, who worried that the devices could fracture and fail at any moment.
In 1991 an FDA task force charged that Shiley had withheld information about safety problems from regulators in order to get initial approval for its valves and that the company continued to keep the FDA in the dark. A November 7, 1991 investigation in the Wall Street Journal asserted that Shiley had been deliberately falsifying manufacturing records relating to valve fractures.
Faced with this growing scandal, Pfizer announced that it would spend up to $205 million to settle the tens of thousands of valve lawsuits that had been filed against it. Even so, Pfizer resisted complying with an FDA order that it notify patients of new findings that there was a greater risk of fatal fractures in those who had the valve installed before the age of 50. In 1994 the company agreed to pay $10.75 million to settle Justice Department charges that it lied to regulators in seeking approval for the valves; it also agreed to pay $9 million to monitor valve patients at Veterans Administration hospitals or pay for removal of the device.
In 2004 Pfizer announced that it had reached a $60 million settlement of a class-action suit brought by users of Rezulin, a diabetes medication developed by Warner-Lambert, which had withdrawn it from the market shortly before the company was acquired by Pfizer in 2000. The withdrawal came after scores of patients died from acute liver failure said to be caused by the drug.
In 2004, in the wake of revelations about dangerous side effects of Merck’s painkiller Vioxx, Pfizer agreed to suspend television advertising for a related medication called Celebrex. The following year, Pfizer admitted that a 1999 clinical trial found that elderly patients taking Celebrex had a greatly elevated risk of heart problems.
In 2005 Pfizer withdrew another painkiller, Bextra, from the market after the FDA mandated a “black box” warning about the cardiovascular and gastrointestinal risks of the medication. In 2008 Pfizer announced that it was setting aside $894 million to settle the lawsuits that had been filed in connection with Bextra and Celebrex.
Unless these big fines are because such corporation has been really, really bad...
How do we get out of this hole? How do we fix health care and fix these issues?
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/johnsona...
You should be ashamed of yourself.
How are the laws and regs so unclear that a huge corporation of smart people can't avoid big fines? Part of it is a question of Pfizer's investment in compliance - which I assure you is massive - but also it's a lack of clarity and shifting goal posts.
False claims act litigation, for example, is responsible for the second largest settlement listed on this site (phen fen is #1), a notorious and utterly incomprehensible regime where all of the big money settlements relate to aggressive fringe theories asserted by DOJ.