Jointly enforced by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Crime Fraud Division and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the FCPA prohibits corrupt payments to foreign government officials, either directly or via third parties. The law also requires that standardized and defined accounting practices be maintained by companies listed on any U.S. exchange and by their majority-owned subsidiaries, regardless of whether they are based in the United States. The United Kingdom and other countries have recently followed suit by enacting their own anti-bribery statutes, yet the FCPA remains the preeminent anti-corruption law in terms of enforcement. In recent years, the number of FCPA prosecutions has skyrocketed, with penalties routinely exceeding $100 million and prison terms as long as seven years.
Since 2002, when the U.S. began bribery prosecutions in earnest, Nigeria has remained the epicenter of FCPA enforcement. To date, the preponderance of FCPA prosecutions has been related to illicit payments to Nigerian government officials. Most of these cases involved the classic suitcase of cash given to a high-ranking dignitary; however, garden-variety bribes in violation of the FCPA are paid by U.S. companies on a daily basis to middling Nigerian civil servants, and almost always by touts.
