The U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) contains a sweeping prohibition on paying bribes to foreign officials—but also contains an exception for so-called “facilitating payments” (also sometimes called “grease payments”) meant to secure non-discretionary “routine government action.” The exception was included in the FCPA to respond to complaints by representatives of the U.S. business community that it was impossible to do business in certain countries without making these “grease payments” to low-level bureaucrats. The exception has been criticized—occasionally by those who think that the exemption is too narrow and should be expanded (or, to use their preferred euphemism, “clarified”), but more recently by a growing chorus of voices that has called for the elimination of the FCPA’s facilitation payments exception. This chorus has included, perhaps most prominently, the OECD’s Working Group on Bribery (responsible for the peer-review process under the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention), along with several of the OECD’s senior officials. And, notably, more recent foreign bribery legislation—most prominently the UK Bribery Act—contains no exception for facilitating payments. Possibly for this reason, at several recent international anticorruption conferences I’ve attended, participants (especially from outside the U.S.) have asked whether (or when) the U.S. will eliminate the grease payment exemption.

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