Curbs on Heavy-Handed White-Collar Crime Investigations?

A couple of weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that it is revising its corporate charging guidelines for U.S. federal prosecutors. Here's the DOJ news release on the changes. Unless you are a lawyer (or, maybe even if you are a lawyer), most of the release is legalese. What's changed?

Mainly, the revised rules seek to reduce the perception that heavy-handed prosecutors can use the threat of indictment against companies as leverage in their investigations.

Interestingly, this is precisely what KPMG claims happened to it three years ago when it agreed to a more than $450 million settlement and admitted to criminal wrongdoing thereby avoiding an indictment. An appeal of that case was also ruled on late last month. And the judges upheld a lower court's ruling dismissing the case because prosecutors had coerced KPMG during the investigation.