Corporate Securities Law Blog

In Sarei v. Rio Tinto, PLC, Nos. 02-56256, 02-56390, 09-56381, 2011 WL 5041927 (9th Cir. Oct. 25, 2011), the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit became the latest Circuit to hold that corporations may be held liable under the Alien Tort Statute (“ATS”), 28 U.S.C. § 1350. As previously reported here and here, the Second Circuit held last year in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., 621 F.3d 111 (2d Cir. 2010), that the scope of liability under the ATS does not extend to corporations because imposing liability on corporations for violations of the law of nations has not achieved a sufficiently “specific, universal, and obligatory” character so as to be considered a norm of customary international law. In Sarei, the Ninth Circuit joined the District of Columbia Circuit, the Seventh Circuit and the Eleventh Circuit in reaching the opposite conclusion. The current circuit split will be resolved by the United States Supreme Court, which granted certiorari to Kiobel on October 17, 2011.

As we noted in a previous post, on January 1, 2012, the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act of 2010 (the "Act") will become effective. This legislation will require every large retailer and manufacturer doing business in California to publicly disclose whether it has taken specified actions to eliminate slavery and human trafficking from its product supply chain. The Act does not require a company to make any effort to eliminate slavery or human trafficking, but only to disclose the extent, if any, to which it has taken the actions listed in the Act. The impact of the Act ultimately will depend on the extent to which consumers, investors and activists use the required disclosure to pressure companies to monitor and eliminate abuses in their supply chains. On August 1, 2011, federal legislation modeled on the Act was introduced.

On September 21, 2011, the IRS announced (in Announcement 2011-64) a new program that will allow employers to resolve their worker classification problems at a relatively low cost. This new Voluntary Classification Settlement Program (VCSP) is available to businesses that erroneously treat their workers or a class or group of workers as nonemployees or independent contractors, and now want to correctly treat these workers as employees. Employers accepted into the program will pay an amount effectively equaling just over one percent of the wages paid to the reclassified workers for the past year (technically, the employer will pay 10% of the employment tax liability that may have been due on compensation paid to the workers for the most recent tax year, determined under reduced rates). The employer will not be audited on payroll taxes related to these workers for prior years, and will not be subject to interest or penalties. To participate in the program, the employer must meet certain eligibility requirements, apply to participate in the VCSP, and enter into a closing agreement with the IRS.