FCPA Declinations and Individual Prosecutions: Different Outcomes in the Same Matter

An FCPA declination and an individual prosecution can come out of the same bribery investigation. The Justice Department may decide not to prosecute a company while bringing charges against people involved in its transactions. Balt’s corporate declination accompanied an indictment of an executive and a consultant. Corsa Coal’s preceded an individual’s guilty verdict. Cognizant’s corporate declination and the later dismissals of its former executives’ cases were separate decisions. For an insider who knows the payments, the company announcement tells only part of the story.

The useful comparison follows the business records: who approved the payment, who received it and what the customer bought afterward. Those facts can appear in a company’s cooperation account and in a separate case against an individual. The document resolving the company’s case determines what the company agreed to. The indictment, verdict or dismissal determines what happened in the person’s case.

What an FCPA Declination Means for the Company

An FCPA declination is the Justice Department’s decision not to prosecute the company for violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Under the corporate enforcement policy, that decision can follow the company’s disclosure of misconduct, cooperation with investigators and work to correct what went wrong. The company’s response to the conduct becomes part of the reason for its treatment.

The March 10, 2026 Corporate Enforcement and Voluntary Self-Disclosure Policy provides for qualifying declinations when the company voluntarily discloses, fully cooperates and makes timely, appropriate corrections, without aggravating circumstances. Prosecutors can also weigh aggravating circumstances against the company’s disclosure, cooperation and corrective work. Balt’s letter expressly applied this version of the policy.

For someone inside the business, the consequential part of corporate self-disclosure is what cooperation reveals. The policy calls for facts about the people involved, regardless of seniority, and ties those facts to specific sources. It reaches documents held overseas and the employees or agents who can explain them. An invoice history, an approval message and the person who understood the payment can each add something the company’s general account leaves out.

The policy also calls for the history behind the documents: where they were found, who held them and who created or located them. It expects a cooperating company to identify opportunities for investigators to obtain relevant evidence outside the company’s possession. Knowing who prepared an invoice, where its description came from or which intermediary handled the next payment can help connect records that sit in different hands.

Balt’s Declination and the Separate Indictment

Balt SAS and Balt USA LLC received a corporate declination while an executive and a consultant faced separate criminal charges. The Justice Department’s March 17, 2026 letter covered both companies. The individual indictment was filed on March 4, and the department announced the two developments on March 19. The letter resolved the corporate investigation. The indictment alleged what the individuals had done.

In the letter, the Justice Department described evidence of approximately $602,000 in bribes to a physician in a senior role at a French state-owned public hospital. It said the payments went through a consultant in Belgium to obtain hospital purchases of endovascular embolization coils and ancillary products. The letter attributed approximately $1,683,215 in revenue to the scheme, with $1,214,797 in profits that Balt agreed to return. The hospital’s buying decision was the commercial prize.

The criminal indictment explains the product and the alleged incentive. The coils treated brain aneurysms and other vascular conditions. Prosecutors alleged that the executive and consultant stood to gain millions of dollars in milestone payments tied to future product sales under an acquisition agreement. The alleged personal incentive sat beside the company’s interest in selling more devices.

According to that indictment, purported consulting fees and bonuses supplied money for the physician. Sham agreements and fake invoices gave those transfers a business explanation, while personal email and encrypted messages carried discussions of the alleged scheme. The indictment also alleged that the consultant moved money from his consulting company’s Belgian account to the physician’s accounts in France. The invoice’s description and the payment’s destination told different stories.

One exchange makes the alleged concealment particularly concrete. The indictment quotes the consultant proposing that a payment calculated against coils be invoiced as a sales and marketing session for prospective distributors. He proposed following the private exchange with an official email supplying the program, location and participants for approval. The executive allegedly replied that the arrangement was acceptable.

The indictment later quotes the consultant’s description of a new bonus:

We do not need a more elaborate label for the alleged invoice fiction. The consultant supplied one himself. For someone who handled these transactions, the difference between the private explanation and the official approval request is the point: the business record was allegedly being built to conceal the payment’s purpose.

The indictment also describes pressure reaching the finance function. In an April 2019 message, the consultant allegedly demanded a wire transfer and threatened to tell the physician to stop everything if a finance employee did not send it that day. For someone processing the request, that message connects the urgency of the payment to the physician’s role. It gives the approval request a meaning that a consulting invoice, read by itself, would conceal.

The corporate letter credited Balt’s voluntary disclosure during an ongoing internal investigation, proactive cooperation and information about the people involved. It also described ending the business relationships behind the conduct, improving controls and training senior management. Balt agreed to continue supplying information and making knowledgeable personnel available to investigators.

In the declination letter, Balt accepted responsibility for the criminal conduct described there. The letter expressly kept individual prosecution separate. The company’s cooperation and the individual indictment therefore fit together: the corporate benefit depended in part on helping explain the underlying transactions.

Corsa Coal’s FCPA Declination and the Related Trial

Corsa Coal’s FCPA declination preceded a guilty verdict in a related individual prosecution. The company appears in the Justice Department’s 2023 FCPA declination list. In its February 19, 2026 account of the coal-company trial, the department reported a guilty verdict in the related coal-business criminal case.

The verdict covered seven counts: three FCPA counts, three money-laundering counts and one wire-fraud-conspiracy count. That finding belonged to the individual’s trial. The company’s earlier declination remained a separate corporate disposition.

For an employee reading a company announcement, the distinction is practical. The company name and its outcome do not tell the whole story of the transactions or the people who handled them.

Cognizant’s Declination and the Later Executive Dismissals

Cognizant Technology Solutions appears in the 2019 corporate FCPA declination list, while its former executives’ criminal and civil cases ended through separate dismissals in 2025. The court dismissed the criminal case on April 3, 2025.

The Securities and Exchange Commission addressed its own civil case on July 15, 2025. In its dismissal announcement, the SEC said it and the former executives had filed an agreement to dismiss the civil action. It expressly described the decision as a policy judgment, rather than an assessment of the claims’ merits.

For an insider comparing outcomes, that distinction keeps the company headline from doing too much work. A declination, a guilty verdict and a policy-based dismissal each answer a different question. We care about both the outcome and the underlying account of who authorized the payment, because an announcement ending a case cannot substitute for that transaction history.

The FCPA Declination List Through March 2026

The Justice Department’s public Pilot Program and Corporate Enforcement Policy FCPA declination list, updated March 24, 2026, identifies the following companies by year. Balt’s letter, Corsa’s individual verdict and the Cognizant dismissals show why the company list alone cannot explain what happened to everyone involved in a matter.

Liberty Mutual’s Marketing Expenses and Bank Referrals

Liberty Mutual’s declination provides another example of a company benefit tied to cooperation about people and payments. Its August 7, 2025 letter described evidence that employees of its Indian subsidiary, Liberty General Insurance, used intermediaries to pay officials at six state-owned banks. The alleged return was customer referrals to the subsidiary’s insurance products.

The letter said employees concealed the payments by recording them as marketing expenses and using third parties to deliver money to officials. For someone in the insurance business, the referral is the link between the expense and the sale. A marketing entry explains where an amount sits in the books while the bank relationship explains what the payment allegedly bought.

The Justice Department credited Liberty Mutual’s disclosure in March 2024, its cooperation about the people involved and its corrective work. That work included improved oversight of third-party payments and policies governing business communications on messaging applications. The letter put the alleged bribes at approximately $1.47 million and the resulting revenue at approximately $9.2 million. Liberty Mutual agreed to return $4,699,088 in profits from its relationships with the banks. As in Balt, the letter expressly separated the corporate declination from possible individual prosecution.

The Company Benefit and the Whistleblower’s Reward

FCPA whistleblower rewards follow separate agency programs, with their own treatment of the information supplied and the money recovered. The public corporate list identifies companies receiving declinations, not employees receiving rewards.

Balt’s and Liberty Mutual’s letters describe agreements to return profits. We work through the connection between your information and a potential reward with you and FCPA whistleblower lawyers, including what you added to the government’s understanding of the payments.

The distinction also matters when comparing foreign bribery with fraud against U.S. government programs. A whistleblower case under the False Claims Act can pay 15% to 30% of what the government recovers. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act uses agency enforcement and whistleblower award programs.

What the Insider Adds to the Company Account

An insider can connect an official’s buying decision to the intermediary invoice, payment approval and explanation used inside the business. Balt’s indictment describes a proposed public-facing marketing explanation following a private discussion of payment to a physician. Liberty Mutual’s letter describes marketing entries behind alleged payments for bank referrals. In both, the commercial explanation is part of the evidence.

The roles can sit in different businesses and countries. A sales employee may understand the customer relationship, while an accountant sees the payment description and a consultant knows the intended recipient. Connecting those records and decisions gives the transaction a meaning that an expense label alone cannot supply.

There is also evidence that the possibility of an employee report affects company behavior. The March 2019 working paper Do Corporate Whistleblower Laws Deter Accounting Fraud?, hosted by MIT Sloan, studied companies held by state pension funds as states adopted False Claims Acts. It estimated a 5% to 9% reduction in accounting-fraud probability following exposure to those whistleblower provisions, using accounting-based measures of fraud risk.

The finding gives a separate reason to take the employee’s knowledge seriously: the ability to bring facts outside the business can affect the business’s incentives. In the declination letters, cooperation is valuable precisely because it helps investigators understand what happened inside.

Your Knowledge Deserves Its Own Hearing

If you know what the consultant actually did, who approved the invoice or why the customer placed the order, talk with our whistleblower experts about the transactions behind the company announcement. We build the case strategy around what you know and bring in FCPA whistleblower lawyers who understand intermediary payments and corporate investigations. Bring us the payment history behind the company’s announcement, and we will help you build your strongest FCPA whistleblower case.