Much has been written about President Trump’s February 10th Executive Order Titled “Pausing Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Enforcement to Further American Economic and National Security.”
Below are some random thoughts about certain recent commentary.
This article asks “so how should U.S. business leaders navigate a potential world without the FCPA, or with a weakened or selectively enforced FCPA?”
For starters, there is still an FCPA – nothing has changed in this regard.
Second, the FCPA has been selectively enforced for nearly 50 years. If you don’t understand or acknowledge this you simply are not well-informed or paying attention.
One of the loudest ranters in the compliance space about all things Trump writes about national security and FCPA enforcement.
There is actually a national security exemption in the FCPA statute and the U.S. government – CIA, etc. – has long maintained classified relationships with companies which could implicate the FCPA. (See here for the prior post).
In this report, Public Citizen (which describes itself as a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power) claims that the “Trump administration has already halted or moved to dismiss enforcement investigations and cases against 89 corporations including” …. “twenty corporations facing Department of Justice (DOJ) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) cases and investigations into possible Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations.”
There is no citation for this claim.
Citation please.
Put this article on your reading stack. It is written by Ephraim Wernick (a former DOJ FCPA enforcement attorney). He states:
“Anticorruption activists now fear that Trump’s pause will be permanent and that enforcement will be dead. But these fears are misplaced. This law is being right-sized, not killed.”
