Today our favorite statute, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, turns 42.
In signing the FCPA into law, President Jimmy Carter stated:
“I am pleased to sign into law S. 305, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 and the Domestic and Foreign Investment Improved Disclosure Act of 1977. During my campaign for the Presidency, I repeatedly stressed the need for tough legislation to prohibit corporate bribery. S. 305 provides that necessary sanction. I share Congress’s belief that bribery is ethically repugnant and competitively unnecessary. Corrupt practices between corporations and public officials overseas undermine the integrity and stability of governments and harm our relations with other countries. Recent revelations of widespread overseas bribery have eroded public confidence in our basic institutions.
This law makes corrupt payments to foreign officials illegal under United States law. It requires publicly held corporations to keep accurate books and records and establish accounting controls to prevent the use of ‘off-the-books’ devices, which have been used to disguise corporate bribes in the past. The law also requires more extensive disclosure of ownership of stocks registered with the [SEC]. These efforts, however, can only be fully successful in combating bribery and extortion if other countries and business itself take comparable action. Therefore, I hope progress will continue in the United Nations toward the negotiation of a treaty on illicit payments. I am also encouraged by the International Chamber of Commerce’s new Code of Ethical Business Practices.”
S. 305, of course, did not fall out of the sky onto President Carter’s desk forty-two years ago. Rather, S. 305 was the result of more than two years of Congressional investigation, deliberation, and consideration.
If the FCPA is your area of practice or interest, you owe it to yourself to read the most extensive piece ever written about the FCPA’s history – “The Story of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.”
The article weaves together information and events scattered in the FCPA’s voluminous legislative record to tell the FCPA’s story through original voices of actual participants who shaped the law.
Among other things, you will learn: (i) how the foreign corporate payments problem was discovered, specific events that prompted congressional concern, and the policy ramifications of those events which motivated Congress to act; (ii) how seeking new legislative remedies to the foreign corporate payments problem was far from a consensus view of the U.S. government and the divergent views as to a solution; (iii) the many difficult and complex issues Congress encountered in seeking a new legislative remedy; (iv) the two main competing legislative responses to the problem—a disclosure approach as to a broad category of payments and a criminalization approach as to a narrow category of payments, and why Congress opted for the later; and (v) how Congress learned of a variety of foreign corporate payments to a variety of recipients and for a variety of reasons, but how and why Congress intended and accepted in passing the FCPA to capture only a narrow category of such payments.
