The United Kingdom Bribery Act (UKBA) and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) represent two fundamentally different enforcement philosophies to address foreign bribery. Where the UKBA involves an uncompromising strict liability approach to address foreign bribery, the FCPA appears more pragmatic in allowing exceptions for \u201cfacilitation payments. The two statutes further diverge significantly in their enforcement standards and even the scope of their jurisdictional reach. Enacted in 1977, the FCPA\u2019s core function is to prohibit U.S. individuals and businesses for bribing foreign officials to obtain or retain business. The statute further requires U.S. businesses to keep records accurately and establish internal
controls to prevent foreign bribery. In contrast, the UKBA was enacted in 2010, with a focus on addressing both supply and demand side bribery in both the public and private sectors. The UKBA\u2019s provisions do not address corporate accounting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Amid the UKBA and FCPA\u2019s differences, President Donald J. Trump\u2019s administration announced new changes to FCPA enforcement policy early in his second term. These changes aim to address the \u201coverexpansive\u201d and \u201cunpredictable\u201d nature of FCPA enforcement under prior administrations. The new changes include measures like promoting individual accountability and emphasizing the FCPA\u2019s \u201cfacilitating payments exception,\u201d which prior administrations have disregarded. Another change includes offering greater incentives for companies to voluntarily self-disclose FCPA violations. These changes to FCPA enforcement are critical for improving the statute\u2019s deterrence impact and fairness, which prior administrations have often compromised in favor of maximizing the quantity of enforcement actions brought. The Trump administration\u2019s changes to FCPA policy superficially appear to deepen the contrast between the statute and its British counterpart, with the new guidelines aimed at easing American companies\u2019 concerns of aggressive prosecution. Whereas the UKBA operates under a philosophy where aggressive prosecution is key to deterring foreign bribery. Nevertheless, both the Trump administration\u2019s FCPA policies and the UKBA share a view toward maximizing deterrence of foreign bribery, while still maintaining fairness within their enforcement strategies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The United Kingdom Bribery Act (UKBA) and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) represent two fundamentally different enforcement philosophies to address foreign bribery. Where the UKBA involves an uncompromising strict liability approach to address foreign bribery, the FCPA appears more pragmatic in allowing exceptions for \u201cfacilitation payments. The two statutes further diverge significantly in their…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,15,17,463],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles-2","category-current-online-issue","category-forum-archive","category-volume-58"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/58"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4515"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4517,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4515\/revisions\/4517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/cilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}