Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to Reduce Violations
Many companies are trying to expand economically in the market by doing business with an individual or another company in foreign countries. These businesses are engaging in into using improper ways of payments that are leading to secret bribes to the foreign public officials. Foreign countries are not always in compliance with the laws and they tend not to follow them. Having these problems with the US and all the millions of dollars that have been passed they wanted to take a more affirmative approach and be able to correct the problem. That is when congress decided to introduce the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to prosecute foreign companies for corrupt payments within the United States. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is a federal law that was amended in 1977. This law “prohibits the United States from bribing foreign officials to secure advantageous contracts”(1). A foreign official is defined as any officer or employee of the foreign government or any department, agency, public international organization, or any person acting in an official for or behalf any such government or department, agency, or public international organization (2). The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act was implemented for companies from the United States that are managing business in foreign countries to do so without any unethical business practices (3). This federal law consists of two provisions, the anti-bribery and the accounting/book and record provision. The first provision consists of the anti-bribery provision in which contracts with enforcing the Department of Justice. The DOJ is one of the enforcements for Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) in which prosecutes the issuers and their officers, employees, agents, and domestic concern all in which are acting in the US (4). The anti-bribery of FCPA prohibits anything that deals with payments or an authorization of any payment that obtains or retains with business. There are three types of improper violations for the anti-bribery