Civil Penalty Effectiveness in the United States Coast Guard

摘要

The civil penalty is the prime sanction in the United States Coast Guard's law enforcement programs. There have been numerous efforts to describe the impact of civil penalties on entities involved in the legal compliance process. These efforts have resulted in the development of economic models, few of which have been tested with actual data, and none of which have been tested in a Coast Guard environment. This thesis analyzes Coast Guard civil penalty data to validate a basic economic model. An entity perceives an expected cost on noncompliance based on the probability of detection and the penalty assessed if detected. This is compared to the cost of compliance and the entity, as a rational actor, choses the least expensive alternative. The data analysis indicates support for the basic model as well as the hypothesis that increasing the enforcement activity raises the cost of non-compliance more than increasing the level of assessed penalties.