Looking Back At The Senate’s FCPA Hearing
Fifteen years ago this month, the Senate held a hearing titled “Examining Enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.”
(See here for the full hearing transcript, here for the video).
It was the first congressional hearing on the FCPA during its new era of enforcement (to be followed by a June 2011 FCPA hearing in the House) and the first FCPA hearing in Congress since the FCPA was amended in 1998.
In opening the hearing, Senator Arlen Specter (who passed away in 2012) noted that “oversight is a major function of Congress,” but that Congress does “not do very much of it.”
Deputy Assistant AG Monaco On …
Recently Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco delivered this speech at the American Bar Association National Institute on White Collar Crime.
Topics discussed included: “inspiring a culture of compliance,” “promoting compliance through compensation and clawback programs,” and “accountability.”
Monaco began her speech as follows:
“The Carrots We Offer Have Never Been Juicier”
I have been reading speeches by Department of Justice enforcement officials on white collar crime, compliance, and related issues for approximately 15 years.
I take many of these speeches with a grain of salt because more often than not, the substance of the speech have been articulated before and because I am not seeking to actively market DOJ policy as a way to expand my services (as so many law firms and others do).
Many of these speeches have the look and feel on an “infomercial” in which a DOJ official is trying to market and sell its latest widget.
So it was with this recent speech by Deputy Assistant Attorney General Lisa Miller Delivers in which she stated that the “carrots we offer have never been juicer.”
New DOJ Compliance Hire Supports An FCPA Compliance Defense
As reported here, Matt Galvin, Anheuser-Busch InBev SA’s former global compliance chief, will join the Justice Department’s fraud section next week.
As stated in the article, “Mr. Galvin is best known among corporate compliance professionals for spearheading the development at AB InBev of a cutting-edge analytics platform that analyzes troves of corporate data to identify risky business partners and suspect payments.”
According to the article:
Incentives To Induce Action
There is very little in common with COVID vaccination rates and FCPA compliance – except that the government encourages both.
Yet in one instance, the government provides meaningful incentives to induce action and in the other instance the government does not.
As to COVID vaccinations, states are offering the following incentives to encourage more people to get vaccinated: lotteries, scholarships, pre-paid grocery cards, fishing and hunting licenses, passes to state parks, even custom hunting rifles and shotguns. Several states are automatically entering people who have been vaccinated into lotteries that pay out $1 million or more.