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Where Were the Auditors and Attorneys during the Sustainability Charade?
IN BRIEF
The effects of corporate scandals can reverberate for years. Volkswagen, whose conspiracy to hide the emissions of its diesel engine vehicles was first uncovered in 2015, is still trying to repair its reputation. The damage will be felt for some time to come. The authors raise a question that has not been asked throughout this case: Did the company's auditors and attorneys miss opportunities to prevent the scandal?
Another high mileage mark is now in the Guinness World Records book ... an impressive 81.17 mpg. Starting out from VW's American headquarters in Herndon, Virginia on June 22 and returning July 7 ... the record-setting 2015 Golf TDI covered 8,233.5 miles in traversing the 48 contiguous Щ states while burning 101.43 gallons of Shell diesel that costs a total of $294.98. ^ ·
-Bob Nagy, "VW Golf TDI Sets Fuel Economy Record," Kelley Blue Book website, Jul. 8, 2015, http://bit.ly/2I6KD6k \
While the Volkswagen Golf TDI diesel was traversing the country in the summer of 2015, so were Volkswagen engineers, to meet with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and California Air Resources Board (CARB) officials. The regulators wanted to know why real-time emissions monitoring conducted on Volkswagen diesel vehicles on the open road had revealed up to 35 times the amount of pollution recorded when the same cars were monitored in a government testing facility.
On September 18, 2015, the EPA issued a Notice of Violation to Volkswagen after determining that the company had manufactured and installed software (known as "defeat devices") that substantially reduced the effectiveness of the emissions control system of the diesel vehicles when on the open road. The violations spanned the course of six consecutive model years (2009-15). Signed by Phillip Brooks, director of the EPA's Air Enforcement Division, the letter was addressed to various Volkswagen and Audi corporate entities and copied to Volkswagen's outside counsel.
Volkswagen should have seen it coming days, months, or even years before. The day before the Notice of Violation, EPA and Volkswagen officials exchanged emails scheduling a high-level conference call the next morning at 9:00 a.m. The previous evening, Brooks, a veteran of the Justice Department's Environmental Enforcement Section, sent Volkswagen an ominous follow-up...