Compliance & Ethics

The subscription eHarmony sold could last longer than the one its customers thought they were buying. Australians who signed up for premium memberships of six, 12 or 24 months were given the impression that those were the boundaries of the deal, the Federal Court has found. They were not. The memberships automatically renewed for another 12 months, and the price of that second stretch could be as much as five times the price of the first. By the time a customer discovered what had happened, another year of payments could already be theirs to make.

For nearly a decade, O2 Czech Republic and Sherlog Technology sold competing vehicle-monitoring services in a market where, according to Czech competition authorities, the competition between them was not quite what it appeared to be. The Office for the Protection of Competition said that the companies had divided customers and coordinated sales of vehicle and other transport-monitoring services and electronic logbooks from at least December 2012 to June 2022. The arrangement reached into public procurement as well, with the companies exchanging information and coordinating their approaches to government contracts.

Deloitte has agreed to pay the U.S. government $21.5 million to resolve allegations that it discriminated against employees and job applicants based on race and sex while certifying that it complied with the equal-opportunity requirements attached to its federal contracts. The settlement, announced by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas, covers Deloitte, Deloitte Consulting, Deloitte & Touche, Deloitte Financial Advisory Services, and Deloitte Transactions and Business Analytics.

The Justice Department announced three False Claims Act settlements totaling $61.2 million on Aug. 24, resolving allegations against companies working in health care, federal data services and environmental remediation. Tetra Tech paid $57 million. Monogram Health agreed to pay $2.4 million. AiNET Corp. and its former chief executive, agreed to pay $1.8 million.

The Federal Trade Commission and five states have reached a proposed settlement with Zillow and Redfin that would dismantle certain provisions of their 2025 agreement and require Redfin to rebuild the rental advertising business it abandoned. Redfin would have six months after the order becomes final to reenter the market for internet listing services, the websites through which renters search for apartments and property managers advertise them.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission filed proceedings in the Federal Court on Friday against Subaru, accusing the company of breaching Australia’s Motor Vehicle Service and Repair Information Sharing Scheme, or MVIS.

Poland’s consumer protection authority has opened proceedings against parcel-shipping platform Furgonetka over contract terms that allow additional charges to be imposed after delivery and require consumers to pursue complaints through carriers with which they have no contract.