Tag Archives: Foreign Corrupt Practices Act

Troubling Signs of a Resurgent Anti-FCPA Lobbying Campaign

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One of the biggest stories in anticorruption enforcement over the last two decades is the surge in enforcement of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. This development has not only been greeted with enthusiasm by anticorruption advocates, but has had bipartisan political support, at least within the executive branch (the enforcement surge began under President George W. Bush, and has continued through President Obama’s administration). But not everyone has been happy about aggressive FCPA enforcement. About five years ago, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its allies launched a coordinated lobbying assault on the statute and on the U.S. government’s enforcement practices. The Chamber not only published a report (“Restoring Balance”) advocating significant limitations on the FCPA’s scope, but it convinced (and/or paid) a number of other “experts” to take up the cause, writing op-eds, testifying before Congress, and lobbying in other forums. (The Chamber seemed to deliberately prefer to hire ex-DOJ officials to make its case, most notably former Attorney General Michael Mukasey.) These editorials and presentations, perhaps not surprisingly, tended to recite the same Chamber of Commerce talking points.

But this concerted, coordinated lobbying effort basically went nowhere. Why not? Well, there were probably a number of reasons, including the vigorous resistance of the Department of Justice, the intrinsic weakness of many of the Chamber’s arguments, and the difficulty of getting anything through the U.S. Congress. But another major factor was the Walmart corruption story, which the New York Times broke in 2012 (see here and here.) The allegations involving Walmart’s conduct in Mexico were so shocking that any appetite there might have been in Congress for “reforming” (that is, weakening) the FCPA quickly dissipated. Although FCPA critics continued to advocate changes to the statute and current enforcement practices, the concerted, orchestrated push for FCPA “reform” faded away.

But now there are signs that it’s back. Maybe I’m over-reading the limited evidence, but I think a new campaign for FCPA reform may well be underway—and anticorruption advocates should may attention and be ready to fight back. Continue reading →

The Economist Gets It Badly Wrong on Anti-Bribery Law

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Last week, The Economist published an op-ed entitled “Daft on Graft,” which argued that the enforcement of transnational anti-bribery laws like the U.S. FCPA and U.K. Bribery Act is “becoming ridiculous,” with costs that are “spiraling beyond what is reasonable,” and that we are now witnessing “a descent into investigative madness.”

If I spent all my time responding to poorly-reasoned claptrap that looks like it was written either by a shill for business lobbyists or by someone who didn’t know much about the topic, I wouldn’t have time to do anything else. But when such claptrap appears in a widely-read, well-respected publication like The Economist, I can’t just let it pass. I know, I know—it may be unfair to beat up on a short op-ed, a format that doesn’t lend itself to in-depth analysis or nuance. But still, even by the standards of op-eds in popular periodicals, this is pretty bad. The diagnosis of the problem is shrill, one-sided, and hyperbolic, and the proposed reforms are either already in place, or misguided.

Maybe the best way to approach this is to consider each of the op-ed’s four proposed “reforms” to anti-bribery law enforcement one at a time: Continue reading →

Private FCPA Enforcement: Some Troubling Trade-Offs

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In my last post, I suggested that one possible drawback to dramatically ramping up enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act against individuals (from the perspective of those who, like me, favor aggressive FCPA enforcement) is that individual defendants are relatively more likely to litigate than are corporate defendants. This not only might entail a greater drain on the resources of the government enforcement agencies—a familiar and well-understood concern—but it could also lead to adverse appellate rulings on the meaning of key FCPA provisions (particularly if the targeting of more individuals also entails the targeting of relatively more sympathetic individuals). In this post, I want to raise a similar concern in connection with a prominent proposal for increasing the FCPA’s deterrent effect: the addition of a private right of action under the statute.

The FCPA in its current form does not authorize private individuals to sue defendants for alleged violations of the statute. Although some other statutes might authorize certain forms of private FCPA enforcement—for example, in the form of shareholder derivative suits, or suits alleging violations of the antitrust laws or the RICO Act—these forms of private recourse are quite limited in their availability. (I won’t go into all the reasons in this post—Professor Gideon Mark has a nice discussion in his paper on the topic.) Yet many people (including Professor Mark) have advocated the addition of an express FCPA private right of action which, in the view of its proponents, would substantially enhance FCPA deterrence. This idea has attracted at least some interest in the U.S. Congress, though the proposed bills to add an FCPA private right of action have not yet gone anywhere.

My natural instincts are to support a proposal along these lines, both because I’m more of a “hawk” when it comes to FCPA enforcement, and because I’m generally an enthusiast for the “private attorney general” model for enforcing public law. And I could still be persuaded that a private FCPA action is a good idea. But I have concerns similar to those I raised in my last post about greater targeting of individuals, as well as some additional, closely related worries. Here are the main worries, as I see them: Continue reading →

Individual FCPA Liability: A Risky Proposition for FCPA Enforcement Proponents?

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Both supporters and skeptics of aggressive enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act have criticized the fact that the act is enforced much more often against corporations than against individuals. Some critics of FCPA enforcement often assert that it is unfair for the government to insist on corporations acknowledging criminal liability when the government is unwilling or unable to prosecute the individuals who committed the actual crimes. At the same time, supporters of aggressive FCPA enforcement argue that the failure to hold individuals personally liable, and to impose criminal penalties (including prison time) on those culpable actors undermines the FCPA’s deterrent effect. And they have a point: many doubt that fines and other monetary sanctions on corporations—at least at the levels that can be imposed under the FCPA—are sufficient to deter bribery, and there is evidence to support this claim.

Of course, individual FCPA liability is hardly novel; a number of past FCPA cases have included criminal convictions of individual company employees. But many have called for dramatically ramping up focus on individuals, and there are some signs that the U.S. Department of Justice may be heeding those calls. For someone like me, who tends to think that FCPA enforcement needs to be even more robust, this would seem like welcome news. And for the most part it is… but I do have a nagging worry, which may be entirely groundless, but that I want to try to flesh out in this post. The worry goes something like this: Continue reading →

Why Do People Care So Much About the Proposed FCPA Compliance Defense?

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A while back I posted a commentary on the proposal to add a so-called “compliance defense” to liability under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). My basic take was that despite all the attention and controversy surrounding this proposal, in fact it would not make very much difference in practice. Without rehashing all the arguments in detail, my reasoning was basically as follows: First, corporate defendants (the only ones who would benefit from a compliance defense) are so reluctant even to be indicted—independent of the likely outcome if a case were actually to go to trial—that the addition of a formal compliance defense to liability would not significantly alter the bargaining game between the government and the corporate defendant. Second, the government already takes compliance efforts into account at several other stages in the process (and believes it is doing so appropriately), so the addition of the formal defense wouldn’t have much of an effect on the government’s position in settlement negotiations (which, as Jordan emphasized in a post from a few months ago, is really where all the action is).

I recently had an opportunity to discuss my hypothesis that the compliance defense wouldn’t actually matter much at a Duke Law School conference, where a bunch of white collar crime and FCPA experts who know much more about this subject than I do—including Duke Law Professor Sam Buell and Richmond Law Professor (and occasional GAB contributor) Andrew Spalding—pushed back against my argument. Among their many cogent criticisms, I wanted to address one in particular: If an FCPA compliance defense would make as little practical difference as I suggest, then why do the interested parties seem to care so much about it? Why (Professor Buell asks) have the Chamber of Commerce and the defense bar made this such a high priority on their FCPA reform agenda? And why (Professor Spalding asks) is the DOJ so dead set against it?

These are fair questions. I don’t have good answers, but in the interest of moving the conversation forward, let me suggest a few possibilities—and maybe folks out there in the blogosphere can react or offer their own explanations. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Why Debarment Is Different–A Reply to Professor Stephenson

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Richard Bistrong, a writer, speaker, and blogger on anti-bribery compliance issues, contributes the following guest post:

As the recent OECD Foreign Bribery Report made clear, debarment (prohibiting the defendant company or individual to engage in future government contracting) is very rarely used as a sanction in foreign bribery cases, most likely because prosecutors worry that debarment would be an excessive penalty that would often do too much collateral damage to innocent parties. I have argued that debarment can and should be used more frequently, and that the legitimate concerns about disproportionate punishment can be addressed by using various forms of “partial debarment.” In a recent post, Professor Stephenson draws attention to a number of potential shortcomings to my proposal. While I agree with some of his points, I think he understates the ways in which debarment—as distinct from fines or other monetary penalties—can have a distinctive deterrent effect on foreign bribery, and why partial debarment might therefore often be appropriate.

Let me try to clarify where Professor Stephenson and I disagree, where we may disagree, and why partial debarment is a sanction that government enforcers ought to employ more often. Continue reading →

Is the “Too Big to Debar” Problem a Problem? And Is Partial Debarment a Solution?

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In my last post, I discussed one aspect of the (very useful) OECD Foreign Bribery Report: the characteristics of the bribe-paying firms in the 427 enforcement actions between February 1999 and June 2014. Today, I want to turn to a different aspect of the report, concerning the penalties levied in those foreign bribery cases. As the report notes, although these cases have often resulted in quite substantial fines (and associated monetary penalties, like disgorgement), one available penalty in the public procurement context–debarment from future government contracts–has been used extremely rarely (in only two of the enforcement actions the OECD examined). The OECD Report concludes that this is a problem, emphasizing as one of the report’s key conclusions that “the fact that only 2 out of 427 cases resulted in debarment demonstrates that countries need to do more to ensure that those who are sanctioned for having bribed foreign officials are suspended from participation in national public contracting.” This conclusion echoes the thesis of a 2011 article by Professor Drury Stevenson and Nicholas Wagoner, who developed the case for expanded use of debarment in FCPA enforcement actions at greater length and in greater depth.

But the title of Stevenson & Wagoner’s article–“Too Big to Debar”–alludes to the main reason debarment is not used more often as a sanction in FCPA or other foreign bribery cases: Debarment, particularly for firms that do much or all of their business with governments, may be effectively a death-sentence for the firm, or at the very least inflict a level of economic loss that seems out of proportion to the wrongdoing. This concern is especially acute when much of the collateral consequences of debarment would fall on “innocent” parties (non-culpable employees and shareholders, as well as the firm’s would-be government customers). Stevenson & Wagoner’s response to this legitimate set of concerns is not all that satisfying: they emphasize the deterrent value of debarment (perhaps suggesting that debarment is a bit like a nuclear weapon, in that a credible threat to use it means in practice you won’t need to use it very much), and they suggest the government could make the threat of debarment more credible by diversifying its set of suppliers.

More recently, Richard Bistrong (a convicted FCPA defendant turned insightful FCPA consultant and commentator) has advanced what I consider a more nuanced and plausible set of proposals that could allow the government to preserve debarment as a remedy, without necessarily imposing a “corporate death sentence.”  Mr. Bistrong’s proposals all entail some form of more limited debarment: debarment only until the firm demonstrates commitment to effective corrective measures; debarment only from certain kinds of contracts; debarment only from foreign contracts requiring export licenses; or debarment only from contracting with certain governments (for instance, with the government that was the subject of the anti-bribery enforcement action). Putting the details temporarily to one side, Mr. Bistrong’s larger point, as he explains it, is as follows: “[T]here is a misperception that debarment equates to a corporate death sentence. I hope that by elevating some of the incremental enforcement and policy options which might be available in the context of [de]barment, that perhaps the ‘all or nothing’ perception might be reassessed.”

I find all of this plausible and helpful, but I think it’s worth taking a step back for a moment to consider why we might want to use debarment as a sanction in the first place. Thinking this through might be helpful in assessing Mr. Bistrong’s intriguing proposals for incremental or partial debarment, as well as the “too big to debar” problem more generally. Continue reading →

Which Firms and Employees Are Most Likely to Pay Bribes Abroad? Reflections on the OECD Foreign Bribery Report

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I want to follow up on Melanie’s post last week, about the OECD’s first-ever Foreign Bribery Report, and what its findings tell us about patterns and tendencies in firms’ illegal bribe activities in foreign countries. The Report is an important and informative document that presents, as its introduction says, “an analysis of all foreign bribery enforcement actions that have been completed since the entry into force of the” OECD Anti-Bribery Convention. There’s a lot in it, and I may do another blog post at some point on some other aspect of the report. But for now I wanted to focus on one thing about the report that jumped out at me: the way in which the report’s findings seem to be in some tension with my prior beliefs/stereotypes about the contexts in which foreign bribery is most frequent.

Let me start with my prior beliefs, which are not based on much firsthand information, but which I’ve absorbed from a lot of people who work in this area, and I think are fairly widely shared. These beliefs run as follows: Whatever the world was like a decade or two ago, these days most major multinational firms recognize the seriousness of anticorruption laws like the FCPA, and most such firms have fairly robust (though often imperfect) compliance programs. When such firms run afoul of the FCPA or similar laws–which they still do, probably far too often–it is less likely these to be the deliberate policy of senior management, and more likely to be low or mid-level employees “in the field,” under pressure to increase business in high-risk emerging markets. This doesn’t mean senior managers are blameless–they may have failed to set the right “tone from the top,” or failed to implement an adequate compliance program, or looked the other way. But at major multinationals, many (including me) were of the view that bribery is usually not the firm’s policy. By contrast, the thinking often goes, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), expanding in to high-risk foreign markets for perhaps the first time, are much more likely to run afoul of the FCPA. They are less likely to be familiar with the statute, less likely to have sophisticated (and expensive) compliance programs in place, and less accustomed to managing the pressures of doing business in environments where corruption is prevalent.

The OECD Report strongly implies (but does not quite say) that this is (mostly) wrong. As the report states at the outset, “[c]orporate leadership [was] involved, or at least aware, of the practice of foreign bribery in most cases, rebutting perceptions of bribery as the act of rogue employees.” More specifically, in the 427 foreign bribery enforcement actions the OECD examined, in 12% the CEO was involved, and in another 41%, “management-level employees paid or authorized the bribe.” As for the firms involved, the OECD found that “[o]nly 4% of the sanctioned companies were … SMEs,” while in 60% of cases the company had over 250 employees, and in another 36% the company size could not be determined from the case records.

So, does this mean my prior beliefs were all wrong? Are the most likely foreign bribery culprits senior executives at large multinationals, rather than lower-level employees and SMEs? Maybe. But not necessarily. Whereas Melanie treated the Report as refuting the “rogue employee myth,” and spinning out the logical consequences of that refutation, I want to take a different tack, by raising a few questions about how we should interpret the report’s findings here for the types of foreign bribery problems that are most typical. Indeed, although the OECD Report’s findings are important and ought to provoke all of us to re-examine some of our assumptions, I want to suggest a few reasons to be cautious about not drawing overly broad and unwarranted inferences on these particular points. Continue reading →

Can Giving a Benefit to a Third Party Count as Bribing a Foreign Official? Yes, No, or Maybe So?

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One of the things I enjoy most about participating in the anticorruption blogosphere is the opportunity to engage in serious, substantive debates with smart people who think differently about these issues than I do. The exchanges are helpful, even when they fail to eliminate the disagreement. Case in point: My friendly sparring with Professor Andrew Spalding about the investigation of the JP Morgan “Sons & Daughters” program in China, which raises the question about whether offering a job to a foreign official’s child (or other friend or family member) can violate the anti-bribery provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Professor Spalding, in a four-part series of posts on the FCPA Blog last summer (see here, here, here, and here), says no. (He further claims that the US government already took that position in a couple of DOJ Opinion Releases from the early 1980s, and that a DOJ reversal of that position would therefore be an affront to the rule of law). In my post last week, I disagreed, and argued that–depending on the facts of the case–it’s at least possible (perhaps even likely) that JP Morgan’s activities violated the FCPA, and more generally that offering something to a third party can, under some circumstances, count as offering an improper benefit to a foreign official under the FCPA.

Professor Spalding has now posted a thoughtful reply on the FCPA blog. While I continue to disagree with his analysis, the exchange has been helpful (at least for me) is elucidating an important distinction in how we analyze potential FCPA violations–that between conduct that may violate the FCPA (under the right factual circumstances) and conduct that always or never violates the FCPA. Appreciating this distinction is key–in my view–to understanding where Professor Spalding goes wrong (though I suspect he will continue to disagree!). While I don’t want to go round and round in circles on the same issues, let me take one more crack at what I view as the key point: Continue reading →

JP Morgan, Sons & Daughters, and the Rule of Law

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One of the more interesting ongoing Foreign Corrupt Practices Act investigations involves allegations that the investment banking giant JP Morgan’s “sons and daughters” program in China. According to media reports, JP Morgan’s China and Hong Kong offices offered jobs, and in some cases consulting contracts, to the children of well-connected officials in China (including the heads of state-owned enterprises and senior party officials) in return for lucrative business opportunities in the Chinese market (see, for example, here and here). The case is still under investigation, the facts are still in dispute, and the government enforcement agencies have not yet accused JP Morgan of any of its executives of any wrongdoing. Yet there have been hints that if the facts turn out to be as bad as they look, the U.S. government will consider JP Morgan’s so-called “sons & daughters” hiring program to have violated the FCPA’s anti-bribery provisions. That conclusion would depend crucially on the premise that providing a job to the (adult, non-dependent) child of a foreign official counts as providing “anything of value” to the official. (Things would be different if there were evidence that the officials’ children funneled some of the money back to their parents, but at the moment no such evidence has come to light.)

About six months ago, Professor Andrew Spalding (who has also contributed a number of insightful posts to this blog – see here, here, and here) published a provocative four-part series at the FCPA Blog (see here, here, here, and here) raising serious concerns about this legal theory, and suggests that applying it in JP Morgan’s case would be not only inappropriate, but a serious affront to fundamental legal principles. Somewhat unusually, I find myself in disagreement with Professor Spalding. Indeed, if the facts turn out to be as bad as early media reports suggest, I think that this is an easy case. To my mind, it’s straightforward that offering a benefit to a third party can count as offering “anything of value” to a foreign official under the FCPA, and nothing in the DOJ’s prior opinion releases would constrain the U.S. government from applying that principle in this case. Continue reading →