The DOJ and FTC recently released their annual reports on antitrust enforcement for the 2014 fiscal year. These reports highlighted the agencies' achievements in the previous year and illustrated their ongoing goals.

In its annual report the DOJ reported 20 merger matters resulting in litigation, consent decrees, restructuring or abandonment. In particular, the DOJ noted ten matters settled by consent decree, four litigated cases and four abandoned deals.

The DOJ continued to pursue criminal enforcement actions in the 2014 fiscal year. The DOJ filed 62 cases and obtained nearly $1.3 billion in criminal fines, the highest ever obtained in a single year. The DOJ also began assembling information on the fines it actually collected, which totalled $1.86 billion in the 2014 fiscal year.

Since 2009, the DOJ has obtained over $4 billion in criminal fines. The average prison sentence from 2010 to 2014 was nearly 25 months, up from 20 months from 2000-2009 and eight months in the 1990s. The DOJ also secured its first ever extradition on an antitrust charge for an Italian national extradited from Germany for his alleged participation in a marine hose cartel.

The DOJ continued its domestic and international cartel enforcement, including the auto parts cartel and the LIBOR cartel. For more information on the DOJ's cartel enforcement, see Cartels Toolkit.

In its highlights of 2014 enforcement actions, the FTC focused on healthcare markets, challenging hospital mergers and pharmaceutical company mergers that would likely allow firms to raise drug prices. The FTC also continued to challenge anticompetitive reverse payment settlement agreements (also known as pay-for-delay agreements).

The FTC further focused its efforts on technology markets, challenging mergers between two aerial measurement services firms and two firms that license national assessor and recorder bulk data. Overall, the FTC filed three merger cases, settled 14 matters by consent decree, saw three abandoned deals, and filed eight non-merger actions and one civil penalty action.