What Public Court Filings Reveal About Corporate Conduct: A Data Study
Every publicly traded company publishes a sustainability report. Most of them are beautifully designed. Nearly all of them describe the company in flattering terms. And almost none of them mention the lawsuits, regulatory penalties, or investigative findings that paint a different picture.
At Mashinii, we score companies across 11 ethical dimensions using a fundamentally different set of sources: court filings, regulatory actions, investigative journalism, and NGO reports. Not because corporate disclosures are worthless, but because they are insufficient. A company's own account of its conduct is one perspective. The public record is another.
This article examines what happens when you look at the public record instead of the sustainability report. We analysed real scoring data from our database and identified patterns that self-reported disclosures consistently fail to surface.
The Data Gap: Self-Reporting vs. Independent Evidence
Traditional ESG ratings rely heavily on corporate questionnaires and sustainability disclosures. Companies choose what to report, how to frame it, and which metrics to highlight. This creates a structural information asymmetry: the entity being evaluated controls much of the evidence used to evaluate it.
Public records operate differently. Court filings are adversarial by nature. Regulatory penalties are imposed, not volunteered. Investigative reports are written by journalists with no obligation to present the company favourably. NGO assessments use independent methodologies.
When we built Mashinii's scoring methodology, we designed it to prioritise these independent sources. The result is a dataset that frequently contradicts the impression a company's own reporting would create.
Here is what that dataset reveals.
Case 1: Regulatory Penalties That Do Not Appear in Sustainability Reports
Tesla and the $99 Million Record
Tesla's sustainability narrative centres on accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy. That narrative is real and measurable. But it is incomplete.
According to our analysis, Tesla has incurred over $99 million in regulatory penalties since 2000, spanning financial offences, government contracting violations, and competition issues across multiple jurisdictions. Tesla scored -50 on our Honest & Fair Business dimension.
Additionally, public records indicate that Tesla has faced 77 labour-related incidents since 2008, with 80% being OSHA citations. These documented safety and worker rights concerns contributed to a score of -50 on Fair Pay & Worker Respect.
None of this invalidates Tesla's environmental mission. But a reader who only sees the sustainability report would not know about the regulatory penalties or the OSHA citation history.
View Tesla's full score breakdown ->
Case 2: Surveillance Fines and Data Privacy Violations
Amazon's 32 Million Euro GDPR Penalty
Amazon's public messaging emphasises customer trust and innovation. What the independent record shows is more complicated.
According to our data, Amazon received a 32 million euro fine in France for violating GDPR by tracking employee productivity through invasive surveillance systems. This contributed to Amazon's score of -30 on Safe & Smart Tech. Additional concerns around data privacy practices related to devices like Alexa and Ring, along with questions about algorithmic transparency, reinforced this score.
Amazon also scored -30 on Honest & Fair Business. Regulatory records indicate penalties and scrutiny related to business practices across multiple markets.
Compare this to Walmart, which scored +10 on Safe & Smart Tech after introducing a Responsible AI Pledge and demonstrating a more measured approach to technology deployment. Two companies in the same industry, with starkly different records on data handling, scored 40 points apart on a single dimension. That gap is invisible in standard ESG ratings that blend all factors into one number.
View Amazon's full score breakdown ->
Case 3: Supply Chain Labour Findings That Corporate Reports Minimise
BYD and the Brazil Investigation
BYD positions itself as a leader in the electric vehicle transition. Its growth has been extraordinary. But public records tell a parallel story.
A 2024 investigation in Brazil revealed conditions described in public reports as forced labour among 163 Chinese workers at a BYD factory construction site. Investigators documented allegations of withheld wages and inhumane living conditions. BYD scored -50 on Fair Trade & Ethical Sourcing.
BYD has also faced scrutiny over working hours and conditions at its Chinese manufacturing facilities, contributing to a score of -30 on Fair Pay & Worker Respect.
These findings emerged from regulatory investigations and NGO reports. They describe conditions that would never appear in a company's own supply chain disclosures, at least not in the terms used by independent investigators.
View BYD's full score breakdown ->
Case 4: Antitrust Proceedings and Governance Failures
Meta and Google: Regulatory Actions in Technology
Two of the world's largest technology companies illustrate how regulatory proceedings reveal governance patterns that corporate disclosures obscure.
Meta scored -40 on Honest & Fair Business and -50 on Safe & Smart Tech. Multiple regulatory actions and court proceedings across jurisdictions contribute to these scores. Meta's data privacy record, as documented in regulatory filings rather than corporate disclosures, shows a pattern of enforcement actions that its own reporting frames differently.
Google (Alphabet) scored -40 on Honest & Fair Business and -30 on Safe & Smart Tech. Antitrust proceedings and regulatory actions documented in public court records paint a picture of competitive practices and data handling that differs meaningfully from the company's public messaging. Google does score positively on environment (+40) and sustainability (+40), demonstrating how a company can perform well on some dimensions while facing serious concerns on others.
This is precisely the kind of nuance that a single-number ESG rating eliminates. A company can be a leader in renewable energy and simultaneously face major regulatory action on data privacy. Independent data shows both sides.
Case 5: Warehouse Labour Conditions and Worker Safety Records
Amazon's $5.9 Million Warehouse Penalty
Amazon scored -30 on Fair Pay & Worker Respect. According to our analysis, Amazon faced a $5.9 million penalty in California for violating warehouse quota laws. India's National Human Rights Commission has also scrutinised Amazon over harsh working conditions at its facilities.
Amazon has increased base wages for U.S. workers to over $22 per hour as part of a $2.2 billion initiative. But a study found that warehouse workers in counties with Amazon operations earn 26% less than the average for all workers in those areas. The wage increase and the below-average earnings exist simultaneously. One is in the sustainability report. The other is in academic research and regulatory data.
This pattern, where the voluntary disclosure tells one story and the independent record tells another, is not unique to Amazon. It is structural to how corporate reporting works.
Case 6: Defence Contracts Hidden in Cloud Computing
Microsoft and Amazon Web Services
Military contracts are a dimension of corporate conduct that sustainability reports rarely address directly, even when they represent billions in revenue.
Microsoft scored -60 on No War, No Weapons. Public procurement records document significant defence contract relationships that are part of the public record but not prominent in Microsoft's sustainability messaging.
Amazon scored -30 on the same dimension. AWS has secured multiple defence contracts documented in public procurement records, including a $22 million cloud services contract with the U.S. Army, a share of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract with a ceiling up to $9 billion, and a $723.9 million contract for additional defence cloud infrastructure.
Whether military contracts are an ethical concern depends on the investor. But the fact that these contracts are systematically absent from sustainability reports, while being freely available in public procurement databases, illustrates the gap between voluntary disclosure and the full public record.
Explore what No War, No Weapons measures ->
What These Cases Have in Common
Every example above shares a pattern:
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The company's own disclosures present a favourable narrative. This is expected. Companies are not obligated to highlight their worst moments in their own reports.
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The independent record contains material information that the corporate narrative omits. Court filings, regulatory penalties, and investigative findings describe events and patterns that do not appear in sustainability reports.
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The gap between the two is measurable. Our scoring methodology quantifies this gap. A company that self-reports strong governance but has $99 million in regulatory penalties does not score the same as a company with a clean regulatory record.
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Single-number ratings hide these divergences. A company that scores +40 on environment and -50 on governance gets blended into a mediocre average. The investor never sees the extremes.
Where Independent Data Comes From
Our scoring methodology draws on several categories of independent sources. Each reveals different aspects of corporate conduct:
| Source Category | What It Reveals | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Court filings | Lawsuits, settlements, judicial findings of fact | Tesla's regulatory penalties across jurisdictions |
| Regulatory actions | Fines, enforcement actions, compliance orders | Amazon's GDPR fine for employee surveillance |
| Investigative journalism | Working conditions, undisclosed practices, supply chain issues | BYD's forced labour findings in Brazil |
| NGO reports | Human rights assessments, environmental audits, supply chain investigations | Worker rights scrutiny across tech and retail |
| Public procurement records | Government contracts, military relationships, spending patterns | Microsoft and Amazon's defence contracts |
| Academic research | Labour market impacts, environmental studies, governance analysis | Wage impact studies in Amazon warehouse counties |
No single source tells the whole story. Court filings can be dismissed. Regulatory fines can be appealed. Investigative reports can be disputed. But taken together, across multiple independent sources, patterns emerge that corporate self-reporting does not capture.
Learn more about our methodology ->
Why This Matters for Investors
If you use ESG ratings based primarily on corporate disclosures, you are seeing a filtered version of reality. This does not mean ESG ratings are useless. It means they are incomplete.
The companies in this study are among the most widely held stocks in the world. They sit in index funds, retirement accounts, and model portfolios globally. Their ethical profiles, as revealed by independent data, may differ significantly from what their sustainability reports suggest.
Mashinii scores over 5,000 companies across 11 independent dimensions. Every score is built from independently sourced evidence. Every negative finding references specific public records. We do not use corporate self-assessments, and companies cannot influence their scores through voluntary disclosures.
The public record exists. The question is whether your investment analysis includes it.
See What Independent Data Says About Your Holdings
You can look up any company in our database and see how it scores across all 11 ethical dimensions, with cited sources for every score.