The long-sought Combating Organized Retail Crime Act is getting closer to becoming law as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley, R-IA, and Ranking Member Dick Durbin D-IL, moved to advanced the legislation in the United States Senate.
The bill would create a central clearinghouse to gather information, coordinate data and help law enforcement attack retail crime at the local, national and international levels.
The Senate version of the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act (CORCA) has now been placed in a package of amendments attached to the Fiscal Year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The bipartisan CORCA action is focused on improving the Federal response to organized retail crime and establishing new tools to recover stolen goods.
“As I often remind Iowans at my county meetings, I’m always working to find bipartisan agreement to solve everyday issues impacting American families,” Grassley stated as the legislation advanced. “My work with Senator Durbin on commonsense legislation to curb crime is a prime example of bipartisanship in action. Together, we’re committed to making America a safer place to live and raise a family, and we’ll keep fighting to move our bills forward as part of Congress’ annual defense legislation.”
Attaching the bill was a means of expediting its movement through the Senate after the House had passed its own version. Hannah Akey, press secretary for the Senate Judiciary Committee in Chairman Grassley’s office, explained that the CORCA bill had not been marked up and moved, as was the case in the House.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee
Akey noted: “It will be reviewed alongside all the other NDAA amendments by the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) as well as the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee due to CORCA’s Department of Homeland Security components. After reviewing the amendments over the next several weeks, SASC will then release the final bill text for consideration on the Senate floor.”
The NDAA can be characterized as a must-pass piece of legislation. Attached to the NDAA, the CORCA legislation has a better chance of getting signed into law by this year’s end than it would as a stand-alone bill subject to time constraints and competing priorities on the Senate floor.
On May 12, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act, sponsored by Congressman Dave Joyce, R-OH. The bipartisan, bicameral bill would establish a coordinated, multi-agency response process and create new tools to tackle evolving organized retail theft and combat criminal operations that extend across the supply chain, including cargo theft.
The legislation has been co-led in the House by Representatives Susie Lee, D-NV; David Valadao, R-CA; Dina Titus, D-NV; Michael Baumgartner, R-WA; Brad Schneider, D-IL; Laurel Lee, R-FL; and Lou Correa, D-CA. Senators Grassley and Catherine Cortez Masto, D-NV, steered it along on their side of Capitol Hill.
At the bill’s passage, Rep. Joyce said, “Organized retail crime is an issue that affects everyone. Whether you are a business owner, truck driver or the average consumer, these criminal enterprises are hurting your wallet and putting communities in danger. The Combating Organized Retail Crime Act takes a targeted approach to apprehending these criminal networks by establishing an Organized Retail and Supply Chain Crime Coordination Center at the Department of Homeland Security and giving law enforcement the tools they need to do their job and protect our communities.”
The center will act as an informational clearinghouse to help lead and coordinate the fight against organized retail crime in the U.S.
The legislation took a big step toward securing Congressional approval in January when the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee marked up, or established a final text, and moved the bill into position for a final vote, which passed.
The markup of H.R. 2853, the House Combating Organized Retail Crime Act, completed the judiciary committee’s work on the final bill and paved the way for the House vote.
Jonathan Gold, Vice President for Supply Chain & Customs Policy, National Retail Federation
The National Retail Federation, with support from the International Housewares Association and other trade organizations, has been promoting legislation to combat criminal activity affecting store operators and their suppliers, both online and across the supply chain. The House markup represented a critical advance, giving the CORCA legislation momentum.
NRF’s Jonathan Gold, vice president for supply chain and customs policy, called the House Judiciary Committee markup “an incredibly important step for the bill to move forward.”
The House and Senate legislation supports establishing the Organized Retail and Supply Chain Crime Coordination Center to gather information and help law enforcement combat a category of organized criminal enterprises that cross state and even international boundaries. The legislation is designed to create new means of combating shoplifting, supply chain theft, and online offenses, including the fencing of goods pilfered from stores and trucks. Organized retail crime encompasses a range of offenses that many people, including those in government, have seen as local, incidental problems.
However, making real progress against ORC is difficult when enforcement has been primarily occurring at the local level. Enforcement at the local level where thefts occur doesn’t necessarily have a significant effect on the perpetrators and systems that lurk behind the single criminal violation, including the fences who move goods through e-commerce sales, often through marketplace operations and increasingly via social media.
Gold said the content and movement of the bill indicated “Congress now recognizes that organized retail crime as well as supply chain theft is an issue, and they have to step up and help folks to address it. This is probably the best way to do it.”
David Johnston, NRF vice president, asset protection and retail operations, noted that with the final passage, the coordination center will align the efforts of multiple Federal agencies, as well as state and local law enforcement and prosecutors. Retailers will play a role as well. Many retailers have long used their own resources to initiate crime investigations, supporting local law enforcement in combating retail wrongdoing.
The center would create an office to gather input from contributors across the U.S., serving as a data-cleansing function that has long been a retail priority. In that way, law enforcement can gain a clearer view of activities and developments that inform coordinated responses to take down not only individuals who commit the thefts themselves but also the larger criminal enterprises that support them.
“The one thing to note is that this type of coordination center is not new,” Johnston said. Given existing models, the center can be quickly established to “build up a mechanism so that law enforcement can start to connect the dots,” he added. “One of the things that the retail industry has been seeing is that, when they get involved with a lot of these investigations, many of them cross jurisdictional lines, and they start to engage in regional, national and even transnational criminal groups. The goal of the coordination center is to connect those dots primarily through law enforcement but with the assistance of private industry, so the retailers, the supply chain logistics firms, trucking associations, etc.”
Johnston said engagement will require trade and other relevant organizations to work with their members regarding reporting practices, and the coordination center is likely to develop guidelines.
David Johnston, Vice President of Asset Protection & Retail Operations, National Retail Federation
“Things that are also needed will be for the retailers to report thefts and crime even to local law enforcement,” he said. “We know that doesn’t always happen, but it’s going to be more important moving into the future because that’s going to help everyone see that a theft on the East Coast might be involving a West Coast organization or a burglary happening in the Midwest could involve a transnational criminal organization moving product across the southern border. The only way it’s going to be successful is for private and public entities to work together and share information.”
By raising the profile of organized retail crime, the CORCA bill and efforts on its behalf have given government officials and, increasingly, the larger society an understanding that a thief grabbing something from a store shelf is not a minor concern. Retail thefts often become fodder for an aligned system of criminals and criminal groups. The amassed profits generated increasingly are used by large outlaw organizations to fund even greater store-level and supply chain activities, as well as drug and human trafficking.
“What we’ve been seeing more and more as even Federal law enforcement agencies are getting involved, even if to smaller degree, is the breadth and reach of some of these groups,” Johnston said, “and the challenge that we really start to see is that the impact extends across the local, regional and transnational realm of the retail industry, our economy and even where we’ve seen some national security issues. We have seen human trafficking, we have seen weapons trafficking, we have seen drug trafficking. There are existing cases out there that have tied Chinese gangs and fentanyl to Mexican drug cartels and organized retail crime.”
NRF’s Gold said the CORCA bills as proposed in the House and Senate have been critical to making more legislators aware of organized retail crime’s scope. More legislators under that ORC affect not only retail but also the larger economy, as criminals disrupt business operations from the retail sales floor back through the supply chain and, tangentially, because many of the same illegal operations also commit gift card and credit card fraud.
“Folks are starting to understand how complex and sophisticated these groups are,” Gold said.
From the global perspective, legislative initiatives in the U.S. are helping spur efforts in Canada, the European Union and elsewhere. Still, in the U.S., without Federal assistance, it won’t be possible to bring many potential retail crime cases to prosecution, Gold said.
He added that getting the center up and running is key to producing data that federal law enforcement and state and local governments can use to determine how to roll back the tide of organized retail crime. Part of the crucial information that can emerge from work at a national center includes ongoing assessment of ORC’s already substantial economic impact, Gold said. A clear view of the economic impact could draw the attention of key audiences to the extent of the damage and, in turn, win their support for evolving action to combat organized retail crime as perpetrators change their practices to evade law enforcement.
Gold emphasized that it’s not just Congress that has become more aware of the ORC’s impact over the past couple of years.
“We’ve seen states have been stepping up,” Gold said, “and have been implementing updated ORC laws and creating their own task forces. That’s all going to help us to paint that bigger picture. But, again, having that center set up to collect data on a national basis is probably the most important thing we need to get done right now.”
