Tag Archives: United States

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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Risky Wagers: How Lack of Oversight Increases the Odds of Corruption in Sports Gambling

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Thanks to the internet, sports gambling—once limited to smoky back rooms and local bookies—has rapidly expanded, and this expansion has fueled growing concerns over the integrity of professional sports. Sports gambling has long been intertwined with sports-related corruption, but the sheer number of gambling transactions made possible by the advent of online betting (through both legal and illegal websites) substantially increases the likelihood that bribery or match-fixing will be used to ensure a “winning bet.”

National regulatory approaches have not kept up with the heighted risks. The United States, for example, continues to rely on outdated regulatory regimes and ill-defined responsibilities shared between state regulators, federal regulators, and professional sports leagues. As more and more states move to legalize sports gambling, the US is in urgent need of a centralized authority that possesses the necessary incentives and requisite capabilities to properly regulate this burgeoning industry.

To see why reform is needed, consider each of the three main actors (or sets of actors) that have some responsibility to deal with the integrity threats posed by online sports gambling in the U.S.: state governments, the federal government, and the professional leagues: Continue reading →

Responding to the ABA’s Objections to the ENABLERS Act

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In a rare moment of bipartisanship, the U.S. Congress is on the cusp of adopting a significant piece of anticorruption legislation: the ENABLERS Act.  The ENABLERS Act is targeted at closing loopholes in the American financial services system that have allowed corrupt foreign actors to use “gatekeeper” entities like law firms, trusts, payment processors, and accounting firms to launder billions of dollars through offshore accounts. The proposed legislation, which has been attached to the FY2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), would expand the definition of “financial institution” in the current Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) to cover more gatekeeper entities like those mentioned above, and would require these financial services-adjacent entities to institute anti-money laundering (AML) systems, comply with Know Your Client (KYC) regulations, and file suspicious activity reports (SARs) with the Treasury Department. 

The ENABLERS Act, discussed previously on this blog, has received widespread support in both the House and Senate, but some influential interest groups remain opposed. Notably, the American Bar Association (ABA) has objected to the inclusion of law firms among the entities that the ENABLERS Act would subject to the BSA’s AML rules. The ABA’s chief objections are that the ENABLERS Act—especially the requirement that law firms would be required to file SARs—would undercut attorney-client confidentiality and the right to effective counsel and would inappropriately interfere with state judicial regulation of the legal profession.

While the ABA is correct in emphasizing the fundamental principle that everyone is entitled to legal representation, and that lawyers have duties of confidentiality, loyalty, and zealous advocacy to their clients, the ABA’s objections to the ENABLERS Act are overstated. Upon closer inspection, the ENABLERS Act does not ask lawyers to do more than the ethical regime that governs the legal profession already requires or permits.

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Twentieth International Anticorruption Conference December 6-10 in Washington, D.C.

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One mark of the progress in putting the fight against corruption on the global agenda is the size and scope of this year’s International Anticorruption Conference. The first one drew less that 200 people, mostly law enforcement personnel from the United States and 12 other nations (here). Organizers expect this year’s — December 6 through 12 in Washington — to attract more than 2,000 representatives of government, civil society, and the private sector from 135+ nations with many more attending virtually.

Jointly organized by Transparency International and the the U.S. government, speakers include: Delia Ferreiro, Chair of the Transparency International Board of Directors; David Malpass, President of the World Bank; Adesina Akinwumi, President of the African Development Bank; Ghada Waly, Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime; Samantha Power, Administrator for the United States Agency for International Development; the heads of the Open Government Partnership, the Financial Action Task Force, CIVICS, and the chief executives of several multinational corporations.

The theme of this year’s conference is “Uprooting Corruption, Defending Democratic Values.” Plenary sessions will address the “grand issues:” global security, defending the defenders, kleptocracy and illicit finance.  There will be over 60 workshops, and multiple special thematic events and social gatherings.

More on who is coming, workshop and thematic events, and how to register is here.

Guest Post: Is UNCAC Article 35 a “Dead Letter” in the United States?

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Today’s Guest Post is by Craig R. Arndt, an international lawyer living in Bangkok. In the course of a long career, he advised multinational clients on a range of corruption-related matters and has represented those injured by corruption in actions to recover damages.

The drafters of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption recognized that corruption was a transnational disease. And that accordingly, no country could fight it on its own. Hence, in its very first article the Convention makes it clear that states ratifying it are obliged to “promote, facilitate, and support international cooperation and technical assistance in the prevention of and fight against corruption.”  

Article 35 of the Convention sets forth one of the ways states are required to work together to curb cooperation. It provides that each party must “ensure that entities or persons who have suffered damage as a result of an act of corruption have the right to initiate legal proceedings against those responsible . . . to obtain compensation.”

Rick has documented the sorry state of civil recoveries by bribery victims in transnational cases (here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here). That state is now even sorrier thanks to two recent decisions by American federal courts of appeal. In the words of one commentator, the two “gut” article 35.

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Explaining (the Lack of) Corruption in the US Federal Judiciary

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The United States judiciary has a history with corruption. Corruption pervaded every aspect of pre-revolution America, from the customs enforcers up to the colonial judges. Corruption in the United States only worsened a century after the Revolution, with politicians during the late 19th century taking “spectacularly handsome bribes from corporations and demand[ing] kickbacks as the helping hand they extended often came with an open palm.” Early twentieth century America, in many ways, had systemic corruption similar to that seen in modern developing countries. Even as recently as the early 2000s, state judges have come under fire for not only individual corruption, but pervasive, systemic corruption rings. Outright bribery is only one problem: state judges have also been known to engage in misappropriation of public resources, nepotism in appointing counsel, and “skimming off the top.”

Yet in spite of the environment around them, the federal judiciary—more or less since day one—has been mostly corruption-free. As Professor Mathew Stephenson observed, even during the quite corrupt nineteenth century, “at least at the federal level, the institutions of justice—courts and prosecutors—seemed relatively clean and basically functional.” If anything, the federal judiciary, and federal prosecutors, have served as a check on corruption at the state and local level, “particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century.” This pattern continues into the present day: Although the federal judiciary comprises 5% of all judges in the United States, they only account for 0.2% of known cases of judicial bribery.

This raises a question: How did the federal judiciary remain relatively free from corruption, especially during the first century of the country’s existence, when corruption pervaded so many aspects of American society, including state and local courts? There are two broad categories of explanation: historical and structural. These are not mutually exclusive alternatives; rather, the historical and structural explanations complement one another.

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Guest Post: C4I’s New Index Illuminates the Need for Reform of State-Level Campaign Finance Rules in the U.S.

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Today’s guest post comes from Shruti Shah, President and CEO of the Coalition for Integrity (C41), together with Laurie Sherman, C4I’s Policy Advisor, and Stephanie Camhi, a C4I external consultant.

Anticorruption and good governance advocates, in the United States and elsewhere, have long been concerned with the potentially corrupting influence of campaign donations and other political spending on public policy. (Indeed, although the U.S. Supreme Court has deemed political spending to be a form of “speech” protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the Court has also recognized the prevention of corruption, or its appearance, as one of the few interests sufficiently compelling to justify campaign finance laws that limit such spending.) Much of the discussion of the campaign finance issue in the United States focuses on federal elections, yet concerns about the corrupting effect of campaign donations are just as important in state-level elections. State elected officials—legislators, governors, and other elected executive branch officials—play a vital role in creating and implementing public policy, and these officials decide how to spend trillions of dollars on roads, health, education, welfare, and other programs. And money continues to flow into state races in record-breaking amounts. Yet the potential for corruption—both illegal corruption and the “softer” corruption associated with undue access and influence for large donors—does not receive as much attention at the state level as at the federal level.

State-level political candidates must follow campaign finance laws written and enforced by the state, and states vary greatly in terms of the content and quality of their campaign finance systems. To highlight the variance across states in campaign finance laws, and to provide more information to voters and reformers, the Coalition for Integrity (C4I) created the first State Campaign Finance Index analyzing the campaign finance laws and regulations in all fifty states and District of Columbia. The Index assigns states scores based on several factors that, in C4I’s judgment, constitute best practices. The most important factors are as follows: Continue reading →

The U.S. Supreme Court Has an Appearance Problem: What FEC v. Cruz Got Wrong

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According to the U.S. Supreme Court, campaign contributions are a form of political “speech” and are therefore protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. As a result, the government may restrict such contributions only if doing so serves a compelling state interest. Currently, the only interests that the Court has recognized as sufficiently compelling to justify restrictions on political spending are preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption.

Though sometimes presented as a single interest, the prevention of actual corruption and the prevention of the appearance of corruption are not the same. The reason the government has an interest in preventing actual corruption is obvious. The Court has explained the related but distinct interest in preventing the appearance of corruption by appealing to the importance of maintaining public confidence in the electoral process. If a certain campaign finance activity creates the appearance of corruption, then ordinary citizens may start to view their political participation as futile, and may lose faith in the integrity of elections. Because Congress has an interest in preventing this erosion of public trust, the government can regulate campaign finance activities that the public perceives as corrupt, even when those activities are not associated with actual corruption.

At least that’s what the Court has said. In practice, however, the Court has often failed to apply the appearance of corruption standard in a way that serves these objectives. This is nowhere clearer than in the Court’s recent decision in Federal Election Commission (FEC) v. Cruz. The case concerned a federal law that prohibited a candidate from using post-election campaign donations to repay more than $250,000 of personal loans that the candidate made to his or her campaign prior to the election. The government justified this law partly on the grounds that it prevented the appearance of corruption. After all, when a candidate uses donations to repay personal loans, the donor’s contributions go straight into the candidate’s pockets; the public could easily view such payments as fostering corruption. In support of this argument, the government pointed to a public opinion poll in which 81% of respondents thought it was “likely” or “very likely” that donors who make post-election contributions expect a “political favor” in return. Additionally, the government cited an academic study that found—on the basis of over three decades of empirical evidence—that politicians with campaign debts are “significantly more likely” than debt-free politicians to switch their votes after receiving contributions from special interests.

This evidence, on its face, would seem to support the government’s claim that the limit on using post-election donations to repay a candidate’s large personal loans furthers its compelling interest in preventing the appearance of corruption. However, the Court’s majority opinion dismissed the government’s appearance-based argument in a brief passage with relatively little sustained analysis, apparently treating the flaws in the government’s arguments as self-evident. The Court’s dismissive attitude to the government’s evidence in this case indicates a worrisome approach to the appearance-of-corruption issue more generally.

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