Last week, the DOJ announced Andrew Weissmann has been selected as the Chief of the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section.
In recent years, Weissmann has been a vocal advocate of Foreign Corrupt Practices Act reform and more broadly, reforming corporate criminal liability principles.
In October 2010, Weissmann was the lead author of “Restoring Balance: Proposed Amendments to the FCPA.” Written on behalf of the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform, “Restoring Balance,” lead to a Senate FCPA reform hearing in November 2010, and thereafter, a House FCPA reform hearing in June 2011.
Here is what Weissmann wrote in “Restoring Balance”.
“In spite of this rise in enforcement and investigatory action, judicial oversight and rulings on the meaning of the provisions of the FCPA is still minimal. Commercial organizations are rarely positioned to litigate an FCPA enforcement action to its conclusion, and the risk of serious jail time for individual defendants has led most to seek favorable terms from the government rather than face the expense and uncertainty of a trial. Thus, the primary statutory interpretive function is still being performed almost exclusively by the DOJ Fraud Section and the SEC. Notably, these enforcement agencies have been increasingly aggressive in their reading of the law. The DOJ has expressed its approach primarily through its opinion releases, but also in its decisions as to what FCPA enforcement actions to pursue. Many commentators have expressed concern that the DOJ effectively serves as both prosecutor and judge in the FCPA context, because it both brings FCPA charges and effectively controls the disposition of the FCPA cases it initiates.”
Using phrases such as “how far the DOJ has pressed the limits of enforcement,” “DOJ’s aggressive pursuit” of companies as “indication of how far the DOJ is willing to expand the scope of FCPA enforcement,” and “the highly aggressive stance the DOJ is taking to expand the FCPA net beyond its borders,” Weissmann stated:
“The current FCPA enforcement environment has been costly to business. Businesses enmeshed in a fullblown FCPA investigation conducted by the U.S. government have and will continue to spend enormous sums on legal fees, forensic accounting, and other investigative costs before they are even confronted with a fine or penalty, which, as noted, can range into the tens or hundreds of millions. In fact, one noteworthy innovation in FCPA enforcement policy has been the effective outsourcing of investigations by the government to the private sector, by having companies suspected of FCPA violations shoulder the cost of uncovering such violations themselves through extensive internal investigations.
From the government’s standpoint, it is the best of both worlds. The costs of investigating FCPA violations are borne by the company and any resulting fines or penalties accrue entirely to the government. For businesses, this arrangement means having to expend significant sums on an investigation based solely on allegations of wrongdoing and, if violations are found, without any guarantee that the business will receive cooperation credit for conducting an investigation.”
Elsewhere in “Restoring Balance,” Weissmann wrote:
“[T]he FCPA should be modified to make clear what is and what is not a violation. The statute should take into account the realities that confront businesses that operate in countries with endemic corruption (e.g., Russia, which is consistently ranked by Transparency International as among the most corrupt in the world) or in countries where many companies are state-owned (e.g., China) and it therefore may not be immediately apparent whether an individual is considered a “foreign official” within the meaning of the act. As the U.S. government has not prohibited U.S. companies from engaging in business in such countries, a company that chooses to engage in such business faces unique hurdles. The FCPA should incentivize the company to establish compliance systems that will actively discourage and detect bribery, but should also permit companies that maintain such effective systems to avail themselves of an affirmative defense to charges of FCPA violations. This is so because in such countries even if companies have strong compliance systems in place, a third-party vendor or errant employee may be tempted to engage in acts that violate the business’s explicit anti-bribery policies. It is unfair to hold a business criminally liable for behavior that was neither sanctioned by or known to the business.
The imposition of criminal liability in such a situation does nothing to further the goals of the FCPA; it merely creates the illusion that the problem of bribery is being addressed, while the parties that actually engaged in bribery often continue on, undeterred and unpunished. The FCPA should instead encourage businesses to be vigilant and compliant. For this reason, and given the current state of enforcement, the FCPA is ripe for much needed clarification and reform through improvements to the existing statute. Such improvements, which are best suited for Congressional action, are aimed at providing more certainty to the business community when trying to comply with the FCPA, while promoting efficiency and enhancing public confidence in the integrity of the free market system as well as the underlying principles of our criminal justice system.”
Weissmann also testified, on behalf of the U.S. Chamber, at the November 2010 Senate hearing. In his written testimony, Weissmann stated:
“The FCPA had been tailored to balance various competing interests, but that balance has been altered, at times, by aggressive application and interpretations of the statute by the government. Instead of serving the original intent of the statute, which was to punish companies that participate in foreign bribery, actions taken under more expansive interpretations of the statute may ultimately punish corporations whose connection to improper acts is attenuated at best and nonexistent at worst.
The result is that the FCPA, as it currently written and implemented, leaves corporations vulnerable to civil and criminal penalties for a wide variety of conduct that is in many cases beyond their control and sometimes even their knowledge. It also exposes businesses to predatory follow-on civil suits that often get filed in the wake of a FCPA enforcement action. In fact, there is reason to believe that the FCPA has made U.S. businesses less competitive than their foreign counterparts who do not have significant FCPA exposure.”
In concluding his written testimony, Weissmann stated:
“The recent dramatic increase in FCPA enforcement, coupled with the lack of judicial oversight, has created significant uncertainty among the American business community about the scope of the statute. In addition, some of the enforcement actions brought by the SEC and DOJ are not commensurate with the original goals of the FCPA, in that they fail to reach the true bad actors and instead assign criminal liability to corporate entities with attenuated or non-existent connections to potential FCPA violations.”
As reflected in this transcript, during the hearing Weissmann stated:
“One of the reasons it is important to have a clearer statute, particularly in the FCPA arena, is that corporations cannot typically take the risk of going to trial and, thus, there is a dearth of legal rulings on the provisions of the FCPA as it applies to organizations. Thus, the government’s interpretation can be the first and the last word on the scope of the statute as it applies to a company. The lack of judicial oversight, expansive government interpretation of the FCPA, and the increased enforcement that you heard about from [the DOJ witness] have led to considerable concern and uncertainty about how and when the FCPA applies to overseas business activities.”
During the hearing, Senator Arlen Specter asked: “overall, do you think that the act is fairly well balanced and fairly well enforced or too tough?”
Weissmann responded:
“I think there is no question that many of the cases that were brought up today, such as Siemens, fall far, far, far into the—that it is amply warranted for the application of the statute. The problem is that every company in America and many companies overseas worry about the statute daily. And so regardless of what the Department of Justice is doing, people think about the statute and could their conduct fall on one side of it versus the other and will they be subject to an investigation. So it is a difficult question to answer, because I have seen many prosecutions where you say, of course, that seems like a just result and should have been warranted, but there are many companies that are hurt by the ambiguities in the statute and what I think is the over-breadth of some of its provisions on a daily basis.”
Beyond the FCPA, Weissmann has also been a vocal advocate of reforming corporate criminal liability principles.
In “Rethinking Corporate Criminal Liability,” 82 IND. L.J. 411, 414 (2007), Weissmann challenged traditional notions of corporate criminal liability and argued that when the DOJ “seeks to charge a corporation as a defendant, the government should bear the burden of establishing as an additional element that the corporation failed to have reasonably effective policies and procedures to prevent the conduct.”
