Last week the United States Department of Justice filed a report against FedEx Corp (NASDAQ: FDX), charging the shipping and deliveries company with conspiracy to launder money through its deliveries of prescription drugs. This is an additional charge to the previous lawsuit that was filed in July.

These charges were filed in the San Francisco district court. They accused FedEx of knowingly accepting payments from certain pharmacies that used invalid prescriptions to order prescription drugs to be delivered to them. It also claims that the company collected payments for some of these prescriptions to give back to the issuer.

Patrick Fitzgerald, the senior vice president of marketing and communications for FedEx, explained that FedEx requires customers to pay for the company’s services. He states that the company policy to collect on delivery service, which means that the company receives a payment to send back to the original shipper, is available to every FedEx customer. Thus, he insists that FedEx is innocent of these charges and will plead not guilty in the court hearing.

This lawsuit is a test to determine how much legal responsibility delivery companies take for the contents of the packages that are delivered using their services. The company stated that it delivers over 10 million packages each day, and that it is impossible to inspect and police every single one.

The lawsuit states that these illicit activities began in 2004, when FedEx began to repeatedly ignore government warnings that it was violating the law by shipping drugs that were ordered from pharmacies online, where all a consumer had to do was fill out a questionnaire online.

Some of the deliveries from these pharmaceutical websites were delivered to parking lots and vacant homes. The most recent addition to the suit states that the senior manager for FedEx announced that many online pharmaceutical sites have been shut down by the federal government as a result of fraud and illicit sales of controlled pharmaceutical drugs. Recently, there was a case of a teenager dying after being supplied with controlled prescription drug that was delivered by FedEx. This incident was announced in an internal memo by the senior manager.

According to Fitzgerald, many shipping companies, including FedEx, ships many goods that, if misused, can be harmful.

While FedEx is working with the authorities to try to find a solution to this problem. However, the company states that it is the responsibility of licensing authorities and law enforcement to monitor and regulate the actions of doctors and pharmacists.

FedEx has made efforts to obtain a list of illegal pharmacies on the web so it can stop providing their service to them.

A spokesperson for the United States attorney’s office of the Northern District of California has refused to comment.

The first lawsuit against FedEx was filed in July, and accused the company with conspiracy to distribute prescription substances, misbranded drugs. FedEx pleaded not guilty in the court case last month.

If the company is found guilty in the San Francisco court, it could be charged with a fine of up to twice its revenues from the business, or roughly $1.6 billion.

FedEx has already disputed that amount. The company has issued a statement claiming that FedEx’s revenue from the shipments from the pharmacies in question were much less than $820 million.

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