At last week’s FCPA Institute – Boston (attended by a diverse group of professionals from leading companies and firms from around the world) a participant asked about any differences between the percentage of U.S. company Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement actions that originate with a voluntary disclosure vs. FCPA enforcement actions against non-U.S. companies that originate with a voluntary disclosure.
I responded that U.S. company enforcement actions were much more likely to result from voluntary disclosures compared to non-U.S. company enforcement actions, but promised to provide the actual numbers and they are set forth below (courtesy of FCPAnalytics).
Since January 1, 2016 there have been 68 corporate Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement actions. 27 of those actions (40%) originated with a voluntary disclosure.
Of the 68 corporate enforcement actions, 36 (53%) have been against U.S. companies and 32 (47) have been against foreign companies. Thus, recent FCPA enforcement actions have generally been split between U.S. companies and non-U.S. companies – an interesting statistic in and of itself.
Of the 36 enforcement actions against U.S. companies, 20 (55%) originated with a voluntary disclosure.
Of the 32 enforcement actions against foreign companies, 7 (22%) originated with a voluntary disclosure.
In other words, an FCPA enforcement action against a U.S. company is more than twice as likely to originate from a voluntary disclosure compared to an enforcement action against a non-U.S. company.
Because voluntary disclosure is a factor considered by the enforcement agencies in both determining the form of resolution of an enforcement action as well as the settlement amount, as previously highlighted in this post, voluntary disclosure (or the general lack of voluntary disclosures by non-U.S. companies) helps, along with other factors, to explain why so many non-U.S. companies are in the FCPA’s top ten list (see here for the current list).
