Tag Archives: United States

Would the Foreign Extortion Prevention Act Help the U.S. Counter China?

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The U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) makes it a criminal offense for U.S. domestic concerns, firms that issue U.S. and any anyone acting in U.S. territory from offering or paying bribes to foreign government officials. The FCPA does not, however, apply to the foreign officials who receive those bribes. (On occasion some prosecutors have advanced the theory that a foreign government official who takes a bribe can be convicted for aiding and abetting, or conspiring in, an FCPA violation, but courts have generally rejected these theories.) Additionally, while U.S. criminal law prohibits domestic government officials from soliciting or accepting bribes, the relevant statutory provisions do not apply to foreign officials who engage in comparable conduct.

Many U.S. anticorruption activists believe that U.S. law ought to target the demand side of foreign bribery transactions (that is, the bribe-takers), not just the supply side, and have therefore advocated for the adoption of the so-called Foreign Extortion Prevention Act (FEPA). These advocacy efforts appear to be paying off: In late July, the Senate adopted FEPA as an amendment to the Senate’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act. This does not guarantee that FEPA will become law, as the House of Representatives has yet to vote on a comparable bill, and there is no guarantee that the FEPA language will remain in the bill after final negotiations conclude. But the odds have gone up significantly.

Would FEPA be a good idea? I think the answer is probably yes, though the impact is likely to be modest, and probably somewhat less than FEPA’s proponents hope. I may post again later about my own assessment of FEPA’s likely impact, should it pass in something like its current form. But for now, I want to focus on a striking argument in favor of FEPA that appeared in an op-ed a couple of weeks ago. That op-ed, coauthored by Elaine Dezenski (Senior Director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies) and Scott Greytak,(Director of Advocacy at Transparency International’s US office), argued that FEPA would “blunt China’s malign economic influence” by countering the practice of Chinese government or government-affiliated entities using bribes to secure access to valuable resources and to expand China’s political sway over developing countries.

There are many good arguments in favor of FEPA, but I’m not sure that this is one of them. I don’t want to dismiss it outright, as it’s entirely possible that I’ve missed something. But it seems to me that FEPA would have little to no impact on corrupt overseas bribery by Chinese entities, and at least in the short term might make that problem (slightly) worse. So let me lay out the source of my confusion: Continue reading →

Trump Indictment’s Lesson for Prosecutors Charging Senior Political Figures

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At long last federal prosecutors have filed charges against former President Donald Trump for crimes arising from his unlawful possession of classified documents. The charges are contained in what is called an indictment in the United States.

One aspect of the indictment merits the attention of prosecutors everywhere. Or at least for those considering charging senior government officials or ex-officials who, like Trump, can be expected to try to sway public or elite opinion by any means to escape convictions.

The Trump indictment is what American prosecutors call a “speaking indictment.”

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Supreme Court to Congress: Your Fault Corrupt Officials Getting Off

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Two recent unanimous Supreme Court decisions overturning federal convictions for blatantly corrupt conduct again emphasize the need for Congressional action. The one case arose from bid rigging on a New York state contract, the second from the acceptance of a $35,000 “fee” by the manager of then Governor Andrew Cuomo’s reelection campaign to “fix” a problem the payor had with a state agency.

In both prosecutors charged defendants under the statute making it a federal crime to use the mail or telephones or other means for communicating across state lines to cheat an individual of money or property.* For, by my count, the fifth time in recent years (here), the Court rejected prosecutors’ efforts to stretch a law originating in claims “eastern city slickers” were using the mail system to swindle naïve Midwesterners to cover state and local corruption.

The Court also again put the blame for allowing corruption to go unpunished on Congress, reiterating that if it wants federal prosecutors to police the conduct of state and local officials, it must write a law that says so in clear and uncertain terms. Congress took a stab at doing so once, making it an offense to deprive citizens of the “honest services” of a public official.  But as the Court held in acquitting the Cuomo aide, legislators forgot the term “clear” in the Court’s injunction, failing to provide any definition of what conduct was honest and what dishonest. The law was thus unconstitutionally vague, for it did not, as all criminal statutes must, give defendants fair notice of the conduct that was unlawful.

Justice Gorsuch summed up the current situation in a concurring opinion in the Cuomo aide case.  Because Congress won’t say with the precision required of all criminal statutes what conduct by state and local officials violates federal law, it: 

“leaves prosecutors and lower courts in a bind. They must continue guessing what kind of fiduciary relationships this Court will find sufficient to give rise to a duty of honest services.” 

Every time a prosecutor and a court guess wrong, as they did in the New York cases, we get a highly publicized acquittal, leaving citizens to wonder why, if their government is serious about curbing corruption, it is letting crooked pols and their pals off the hook. For reasons to obvious to state, this is no time to be undermining citizen confidence in the government’s commitment to fighting corruption. Isn’t it time Congress seriously considered the metes and bounds of federal power to prosecute state and local corruption?

  • *The law is found in title 18 of the United States Code, sections 1343 and 1346. The operative language: “Whoever … devise[s] any scheme… to defraud… for obtaining money or property … causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication …any writings… for the purpose of executing such scheme… shall be … imprisoned not more than 20 years….” In 1988 Congress added “The term ‘scheme or artifice to defraud’ includes a scheme or artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services.”

The Hidden System of Legal Kickbacks Shaping the U.S. Prescription Drug Market

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In the United States, as in most other countries, it is illegal for pharmaceutical companies to bribe doctors or hospitals to prescribe their products. Those who get caught engaging in this sort of corruption can suffer severe penalties. For example, in 2020, the pharmaceutical giant Novartis agreed to pay the U.S. government almost $700 million to settle a case involving allegations that the company had violated the federal Anti-Kickback statute by offering “cash payments, recreational outings, lavish meals, and expensive alcohol” to doctors to induce them to prescribe Novartis drugs. Yet when pharmaceutical companies offer financial inducements worth billions of dollars to Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs)—not the meager thousands spent on doctors—to promote use of their drugs, the conduct is entirely legal.

What, you may ask, are PBMs? Good question. Most laypeople outside the health care field are unfamiliar with PBMs, and may not even know they exist. But PBM’s play a crucial, if underappreciated and extremely complex role in determining prescription drug prices and insurance coverage decisions. Simplifying somewhat, PBMs’ primary function is to manage insurance companies’ prescription drug plans, a role that includes, among other things, negotiating with drug companies to determine which drugs insurance will cover, and which will be favored. Given that just three PBMs control over 80% of the prescription drug market, PBMs can have an enormous effect on pharmaceutical sales, as drugs that lack insurance coverage are significantly less attractive to consumers than those with coverage. Additionally, PBMs also reimburse pharmacies on behalf of insurance providers for the costs of filling beneficiaries’ prescriptions.

In short, PBMs, which stand in between many of the transactions in the pharmaceutical supply chain, play a major role determining the prices paid by insurers, pharmacies, and patients for prescription drugs. And although kickbacks to doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, and other actors in the system are strictly prohibited, drug companies can and do take advantage PBMs’ complex payment structures to discreetly offer financial inducements in order to gain PBMs’ favor during insurance coverage determinations. There are two main ways in which this de facto bribery occurs: Continue reading →

FinCEN’s Beneficial Ownership Proposal: Invitation to Evasion

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GAB welcomes this guest post by Gary Kalman, Executive Director of Transparency International U.S.

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (“FinCEN”), the bureau charged with implementing our nation’s anti-money laundering laws, is underfunded. They do not have enough staff and significant staff turnover has left the bureau with less institutional knowledge and memory. On top of this, the agency has an Acting rather than permanent Director, undercutting its leaders’ ability to set a clear vision and direction for the bureau.

None of that, however, can explain the agency’s remarkable lapse in judgement in publishing  this proposal to collect beneficial ownership information from U.S. companies.

Let me explain.

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The FDA Drug Approval Process Has Problems—But It Is Not Corrupt

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Is the US drug approval process corrupt? Many critics say that it is, leveling the charged rhetoric of corruption at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) (see, for example, here, here, and here). Yet there have been few, if any, credible allegations of illegal bribery or the exchange of quid pro quo benefits in relation to FDA drug approvals. Rather, when critics speak of “corruption” at the FDA, they are alluding to a perhaps all-too-cozy relationship between the FDA and the pharmaceutical companies it regulates. That is indeed a source of concern: Big business likely has too much sway in Washington, D.C. on a whole range of issues, and the FDA is not immune to the powerful influence of powerful lobbies like Big Pharma. Yet the casual deployment of the rhetoric of “corruption” in this context, though offering attractive click-bait, is both misleading and potentially counterproductive. Continue reading →

Making Corruption a National Security Issue: How Will it Change Enforcement Dynamics?

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Today’s Guest post is by Nedim Hogic. Nedim advises clients in the private and public sector on environmental, social, and governance issues. Author of many articles on corruption, international law, and the rule of law and development, he is currently writing a book on judicial anti-corruption campaigns.

Since becoming an important policy goal in the 1990s, global anticorruption efforts have gone through three phases. In the first, anti-corruption policies were considered important for economic development, driven by the belief that successful anticorruption programs would make global borrowing and spending and financial aid more efficient. In the second, spanning the first two decades of this century, it was central to the protection of the rule of law and democracy.

The current phase, and particularly that part denominated “kleptocracy,” is animated by the threat it poses to global security. The Biden Administration’s national security strategy, which followed its memorandum calling the fight against corruption a core U.S. security interest, is not the first American or indeed international document to suggest corruption is a national security threat. But it is the first to state the premise clearly and straightforwardly, thus marking a sharp change in thinking about transnational corruption. Indeed, in my view the change is significant enough to be labelled a paradigm shift.

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When and Why Do Whistleblower Reward Programs Succeed?

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It is often difficult to expose and unravel corruption schemes without the cooperation of insiders. Yet would-be whistleblowers are frequently deterred from making disclosures due to the personal and professional risks of doing so. One increasingly popular way that countries are addressing this problem is through whistleblower reward programs. While such programs vary widely in their specifics, most operate under the same basic framework, offering a whistleblower who discloses material nonpublic information that leads to an enforcement action a monetary reward—typically, a percentage of the fines imposed on the liable parties—as an inducement to come forward.

In the United States, which pioneered this mechanism, whistleblower reward programs have seen broad success. Between 1986 and 2020, whistleblower cases under the False Claims Act (FCA) brought in $46.5 billion in penalties, with whistleblowers receiving $7.8 billion in rewards. And this is only under the FCA—other U.S. whistleblower reward programs have also led to the recovery of significant additional sums. For example, under the whistleblower program created by the Dodd-Frank Act, which was created in 2011, whistleblower tips have contributed to at least $2 billion in financial remedies for violations of the securities laws, with over $720 million awarded to whistleblowers. The success of whistleblower reward programs in the United States has inspired similar programs in several other countries, including South Korea, Canada, Nigeria, Ghana, Hungary, and Kenya. But not all of these programs have been similarly successful. For example, in Ghana, the first country in Africa to introduce a whistleblower reward program, no rewards are known to have been issued—in fact, few have made use of the Ghanaian Whistleblower Act’s provisions at all.

What factors help explain when a whistleblower reward program will work as intended? There is no easy or simple answer—the issue is complex, and the effect of any given program depends in part on details of the program’s design, including the prerequisites for receiving a reward and the scope of the program, as well as the country’s culture around whistleblowing. That said, two factors stand out as key indicators of whether a whistleblower reward program will succeed in encouraging substantial numbers of whistleblowers to come forward:

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Vote Buying: Why the Secret Ballot Isn’t Enough

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Vote buying is an especially pernicious form of corruption, as it threatens to undermine the democratic process, thereby enabling other forms of corruption and misgovernance. One of the most important institutional mechanisms designed to inhibit vote buying is the secret ballot. First adopted in Australia in 1856, the secret ballot is now the norm in liberal democracies. Yet vote buying remains a problem in many such democracies, especially in the developing world (see here, here, and here). To better understand how to fight this form of corruption, it is important to understand why the secret ballot is not sufficient to eliminate the problem. While different communities face distinct challenges, there are several common mechanisms that allow vote buying to persist, even when it is impossible for the vote-buying politicians to verify that the voters they bribed actually voted the way that they had promised.

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Foreign Law Enforcement Agencies to Get U.S. Beneficial Ownership Information

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The cause of financial transparency just recovered some of the ground recently lost when the European Court of Justice struck down the EU directive on public access to corporate ownership data. Last Friday the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) published draft regulations prescribing how certain limited — but quite important – members of the public can obtain information on the actual, beneficial owners of U.S. corporations.

The privileged group consists of law enforcement personnel. And significantly for the global fight against corruption, they include those from non-American as well as American agencies.

The rules for domestic agencies are straightforward, those for non-U.S. authorities less so as they incorporate the conditions Congress put on foreign agencies’ access. The request must be for a law enforcement purpose or national security or intelligence activity; it must be transmitted through a U.S. law enforcement intermediary, and the requesting government must have either an “applicable treaty” with the U.S. or else be a “trusted foreign government.”

For corruption-related cases these conditions would appear to pose no real hurdle. Moreover, in fleshing them out, FinCEN was attentive to foreign authorities’ needs. FinCEN defines “law enforcement purpose,” for example, to include civil forfeiture actions.

Between the diversity of foreign laws and the many types of agreements foreign partners have with U.S. counterparts, however, the agency cautions the draft regulations might still interfere with current arrangements. Anticorruption agencies, prosecution services, and other non-U.S. authorities should therefore examine the draft carefully, ideally in consultation with the U.S. agency or agencies with which they work. Comments are due by February 23.

I see one potential issue and have one question about the proposed rules.

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