On November 18, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced its enforcement results for the 2021 fiscal year. In the announcement, the SEC highlights a number of different “key priority areas” in which it filed noteworthy enforcement actions over the course of the year. One of these areas is enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).
The FCPA, passed by Congress in 1977, is a U.S. anti-corruption law that prohibits the payment of anything of value to foreign government officials in order to obtain a business advantage. It also contains accounting provisions which require publicly traded corporations to make and keep books and records that accurately reflect the transactions of the corporation. In 2010, the Dodd-Frank Act, which established the SEC Whistleblower Program, added whistleblower provisions to the FCPA. Individuals can disclose information relevant to potential FCPA violations to either the SEC or the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
The SEC’s enforcement announcement listed four separate FCPA enforcement actions filed in the 2021 fiscal year. In the introduction to the announcement, the SEC also notes that “the SEC’s whistleblower program was critical to these efforts and had a record-breaking year.”
The first FCPA action listed by the SEC is an action from October 2020 against Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs agreed to pay the SEC more than $1 billion to settle charges that it violated the FCPA. According to the SEC, “beginning in...
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