Navigating The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, Part 2

In Part One of this two-part blog series, we discussed the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA or Act)¹, a federal law that aims to prevent U.S. businesses from engaging in bribery and other corrupt acts in their transactions with foreign governments.

Part Two: Defenses & Compliance
In this second part, we explore defenses available under the Act and review best practices for compliance. There are two affirmative defenses provided under the Act:

• Local Law Defense – applies to a payment made to a foreign official that is lawful under the written laws of the applicable foreign country. Since most foreign jurisdictions do not expressly permit corrupt payments under their laws, this defense arises infrequently. Local practice or custom (e.g., a foreign country does not traditionally prosecute such corrupt payments) does not qualify for the local law defense. Likewise, the fact that other companies may have made similar payments in the past is also not