Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Fraud

Bribery is a bad thing. Most people can agree on this simple statement, and yet Congress needed to pass The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act  (“FCPA”) into law in 1977 in order to have the right to police the foreign corrupt practices of multi-national corporations. Corporations were found to be using company assets for bribes to obtain & maintain business, avoid paying taxes or for other anti-competitive purposes. Investigations in the 1970s by Congress and the SEC led to more than 400 companies admitting to varied forms of large, institutionalized corporate bribery schemes.  These admissions amount to FCPA fraud today, as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act approaches 50 years in existence.  In fact, FCPA fraud has become one of the largest, most actionable areas for whistleblowers, all based around international bribery by companies with a nexus to the United States.

FCPA fraud today is dually prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice as well as the Securities and Exchange Commission, which covers both the criminal and civil violations of the Act. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act makes it illegal to bribe or attempt to bribe any foreign government official to obtain or retain business.  The books and records provision of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act requires that issuers maintain a system of internal accounting controls to prevent any accounting irregularities related to obfuscating international bribery schemes. 

FCPA fraud has been prosecuted in every industry imaginable, including telecommunications, oil & gas, defense, medical devices, agriculture, transportation, pharmaceuticals and entertainment.  The creativity and breath of FCPA violations is impossible to encompass in a short list, and the sheer magnitude of the quantity of FCPA fraud is evident by the fact that recoveries under the FCPA has totaled billions of dollars in recent years.