Countries Agree on New Measures to Combat Bribery and Corruption
December 11 , 2009
World Trade/Interactive
The 30 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the eight others who have signed the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention have agreed to implement new measures that will reinforce their efforts to prevent, detect and investigate foreign bribery. The new policy was announced Dec. 9 to mark International Anticorruption Day.
In remarks to the OECD, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke called the new measures an “important update” to the Anti-Bribery Convention, which took effect in 1999, that will “add new teeth to our international anticorruption efforts.” Locke cited data showing that since 1994 foreign government officials have allegedly been bribed to award at least 800 contracts worth more than $450 billion. Once the global economy emerges from its current slump, he warned, competition for contracts will increase again and so will the pressure to pay bribes to win those contracts.
Locke asserted that there has been progress in cracking down on the bribery of foreign officials. The U.S. has brought 60 criminal cases under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the past five years, he said, more than were brought in the previous 27 years combined. In addition, all 38 member countries of the Anti-Bribery Convention have passed laws making it illegal to bribe foreign public officials, although many have yet to win a single criminal conviction under those laws.
To further these efforts, the new Recommendation for Further Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions calls on signatory countries to take a number of measures, including the following.
• periodically review laws implementing the Anti-Bribery Convention and approaches to enforcement
• ensure that companies cannot avoid sanctions by using agents and intermediaries to bribe for them
• periodically review policies and approaches on small facilitation payments and encourage companies to prohibit or discourage the use of small facilitation payments in internal company controls and ethics and compliance programs or measures
• fully and promptly implement a 2009 recommendation to explicitly disallow the tax deductibility of bribes to foreign public officials for all tax purposes
• ensure that appropriate measures are in place to (a) facilitate the reporting to law enforcement authorities of suspected acts of bribery of foreign public officials in international business transactions and (b) protect from discriminatory or disciplinary action those make such reports in good faith and on reasonable grounds
• take the steps necessary, taking into account the individual circumstances of a company (e.g., size, type, legal structure and geographical and industrial sector of operation), so that laws, rules or practices with respect to accounting requirements, external audits, and internal controls, ethics and compliance are in line with specified principles and are fully used to prevent and detect bribery of foreign public officials in international business
• implement laws and regulations that permit authorities to suspend, to an appropriate degree, from competition for public contracts or other public advantages enterprises determined to have bribed foreign public officials in contravention of national laws
• consult and otherwise cooperate with competent authorities in other countries as well as international and regional law enforcement networks in investigations and other legal proceedings concerning specific cases of foreign bribery through such means as the sharing of information and the provision of evidence, extradition, and the identification, freezing, seizure, confiscation and recovery of the proceeds of bribery of foreign public officials
According to an OECD press release, the organization’s Working Group on Bribery will monitor countries’ progress in putting these measures in place and report on this progress beginning in March 2010 as part of its quarterly peer-review meetings.
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