In yet another foolish post with false data, the FCPA Blog asks “is there a compliance crisis coming?”
Why might a compliance crisis be coming?
Because the author of the FCPA Blog post received an e-mail “from a compliance head at a Fortune 500: “We are being asked to cut back this year.”
What is driving the apparent “cuts to compliance budgets?”
As stated by the FCPA Blog “well, enforcement is way, way down.”
Set forth below is the current top ten corporate FCPA settlements of all-time actually secured by U.S. law enforcement (in other words net FCPA settlement amounts).
As highlighted below, seven of the top ten FCPA enforcement actions involve foreign companies.
Unlike certain other lists, the below list is calculated after consistently accounting for certain credits or deductions in several enforcement actions involving foreign companies and/or related foreign law enforcement actions.
This post, the first in a weeks-long year in review statistical feast on FCPA Professor, compares corporate FCPA enforcement in 2022 to prior years.
Keep the numbers in this post in mind when you see other 2022 FCPA enforcement statistics that use creative and haphazard counting methods or fail to use accurate or consistent math. (See here).
The most reliable and accurate way to keep FCPA enforcement statistics is by using the “core” approach which focuses on unique instances of FCPA scrutiny. The core approach does not distort FCPA enforcement statistics by double counting parallel DOJ and SEC actions involving the same core conduct announced on the same day nor does the core approach distort FCPA enforcement statistics by separately counting the sometimes unique ways the DOJ slices and dices corporate conduct between parent companies and subsidiaries.
The only category of actor that both the DOJ and SEC can bring a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement action against are “issuers” (the 78dd-1 portion of the FCPA).
The other two categories of actors covered by the FCPA, “domestic concerns” (78dd-2) and “persons other than issuers or domestic concerns” (78dd-3) are only subject to DOJ FCPA enforcement actions.
This post analyzes the percentage of SEC FCPA enforcement that also involve a DOJ component.
I recently spent some time on the DOJ’s FCPA Website and looked at all “Enforcement Actions” involving individuals from 2018 to the present.
Many of the separately listed “Enforcement Actions” involve multiple individual defendants and some individual enforcement actions are listed in more than one year.
By my estimation though, the DOJ’s FCPA website – from 2018 to the present – contains information about 175 individuals and set forth below are some interesting statistics.
