The Asteroid Inspection Service

Shh. They's AIS, one peep an they'll be on us faster'n a spaced 'tray'r gasps out.
I's tryin, yall know I gets th' hic's when I's nervous.
...
Come on out, fools. We know you're in the closet, under the false floor.  Come on out and we'll keep the execution quick and painless.  Make us dig you out and we'll send you all to the Io tantalum mines for five years first.

The Asteroid Inspection Service (AIS) is a cadre of elite inspectors for the many asteroid mines scattered across the belt.  Their primary mandate is to ensure that the Corporation's policies regarding mining, profit sharing, product focus, and even health and safety, such as they are, are followed.  The practical effect is that the AIS act as the closest thing belters have to a police force, as well as a tax collection agency.  The Wildcat miners, all of them technically in violation of Corporate Policy by working while unemployed, fear the AIS above almost every other danger they face.  Wildcat mines always incorporate multiple bolt-holes, hidden sections, and stealth mechanisms to hide the facility, and it's workers, from the AIS. Should the inspectors find their operation, the entire facility will be seized and the unemployed occupants summarily executed.

Death and Retirement

Inspectors are most visible in the field division, but with ten years prior to recruitment, ten years of training before their field assignment, and fifteen years in Office division after their field service, it should be clear that the majority of Inspectors are working in the office. The life of an Inspector in Office division is mostly managing paperwork, processing permits, dealing with Corporate Inquiries, and handling administrative work. The field career of an Inspector is roughly one fifth of their total time in service to The Corporation, and only one quarter of their time in the AIS corps, but it is considered the best and most important assignment of the service. As a result, many older Inspectors will seek out the rare opportunity to get back into the field, called a "Return To Field" assignment. These assignments are rare, but nearly every Inspector in their last five years of service has the opportunity to choose such an assignment once or twice a year. These assignments are typically two or three weeks long and involve a high intensity mission to deal with a dug-in wildcat facility or an urgent manhunt for a high-value miscreant. The high physical demands of these missions frequently result in death of the senior Inspector on their "Return To Field" assignment as they simply cannot handle the physical rigors of field work any longer, and represents almost three quarters of all deaths of Inspectors in the line of service.

The fact that this practice substantially reduces the cost of Corporate Retirement benefits by reducing the population of retired Inspectors to less than half is not unnoticed. This practice, combined with the very generous benefits for those AIS Inspectors who do survive to reach mandatory retirement at age seventy, may help to explain why the Executive Inspectors do not restrict these late-career actions of their Inspectors. For the few Inspectors who survive their "Return To Field" assignments, or resist the urge and decline those assignments, retirement includes a generous pension, a guaranteed condominium in a Luna retirement dome, and a Legacy Bonus, good for one generation, granted to their grandchildren, if any, in the Luna Lottery.  These benefits are immense, more than the sum total of their corporate pay while in the service, but the small number of Inspectors who survive to claim their benefits, the relatively short average lifespan of a retired Inspector, and the low rate of marriage and child-rearing among Inspectors in general, serve to severely limit the real cost to the Corporation.

Training and Recruitment

The inspectors of the AIS are some of the most highly trained spacemen of humanity. Every AIS inspector is required to serve ten years in the security service before applying to the AIS corps, and must meet stringent physical and mental standards, as well as having a record of exemplary dedication to Corporate policy enforcement. No member of Corporate Security may attempt the AIS examinations after they reach the age of thirty-six, at that age they are considered too old to be worth the cost of training.

Once inducted into the corps the training process involves over two years of physical conditioning, training in microgravity combat techniques, training in vacuum combat using armored vac suits, deep-space tracking and detection equipment, apprehension and containment procedures, asteroid mechanics and spacial rendezvous techniques, and, of course, execution policies for any unemployed found to be working a wildcat mine. Once trained a junior inspector may expect to serve another five years in the office division processing records and participating in corporate inquiries, the closest thing to a court trial in this time. Successful junior inspectors spend the following three years as an observer on a field team, and finally, now twenty years into their corporate career and ten years in the AIS, be promoted to full Inspector with an expected service of ten to fifteen years before mandatory return to Office division from age fifty-five until retirement at age seventy.