BuddysBud said:
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 probably deserves a thread of its own. Although it's intent might have been valid, it seems silly that many U.S. companies are being punished by the U.S. government for actions in countries where graft is part of their culture. I laugh every time I read about a large U.S. company being fined because a subcontractor paid a Nigerian official so that items could be released from customs after all the necessary paperwork and duties had already been paid.
I am sure that many Aggies can give first hand stories about experiences involving FCPA.
So worked for a company that was a multinational that did business in several African countries.
Company policy was to not pay bribes unless it was an emergency involving the health and safety employees or contactors of the company. They weren't called bribes but corporate gave them some less scary sounding name, "facilitating payments."
The offices in Africa had a safe with an unknown amount of cash in order to pay these "facilitating payments."
I can only remember one time in almost 10 years that a facilitating payment was made. And I think the determined it wasn't really, but at the time it was sort of a gray area. Manager of some sort had a heart problem and needed to be medivac-ed to Europe (closest hospital flight time wise) and someone in the government was demanding some sort of payment to let the flight take off. We learned about it after the fact in the US. The employees on the ground did everything they were supposed to do, and apparently they figured out it was done sort of "emergency" airport fee.
The only reason I was involved is making sure it got accounted for properly. We had an account called facilitating payments. It ended up going there, but with enough documentation to assuage the fears if the legal team that we were transparent and the government wasn't coming after us for that.
Some companies, or in my mind most try to be as transparent as possible, because they have to report a multi-million dollar fine to shareholders because they screwed up internationally.
If you get caught for FCPA violations, tough ***** You should have known better. As much training and information that is available unless you are willfully ignoring something going on you should be aware of anything going on that might be a violation. It really isn't that difficult to be in compliance.