If there’s one thing that everyone can agree upon about the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) guidance the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) released Nov. 14, 2012, it’s that the document was long-awaited by the businesses that regularly confront the law’s nuances and ambiguities and the lawyers who advise them.
Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, head of the DOJ’s Criminal Division, set off the waiting game in November 2011, when he teased in a speech that “detailed new guidance” on criminal and civil FCPA enforcement was forthcoming in 2012. There was a flurry of reports in September that the guidance would be out the next month. In the end, it came out just more than a year after Breuer first mentioned it at the American Conference Institute’s 2011 National Conference on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
