Kurt Stitcher, Senior Compliance Consultant
The U.S. Department of Justice’s FCPA Pilot Program is nominally designed to encourage voluntary self-disclosure of FCPA violations by providing more certainty around the outcome of such disclosure. The price of this “certainty” is fairly onerous, however, and the program suffers from many ambiguities and flaws that make it only marginally useful to Life Sciences companies when structuring compliance programs and determining the benefits of voluntary self-reporting.
On April 5, 2016, U.S. Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell announced the roll-out of a Foreign Corrupt Practices (“FCPA”) Pilot Program designed to encourage companies to self-report potential FCPA violations. Accompanying her announcement was an “Enforcement Plan and Guidance” from Andrew Weissman, the Chief of the DOJ’s Fraud Section. The FCPA Guidance enumerates several benefits offered to companies that voluntarily disclose such violations, including reduced fines (beyond those offered under the United States Sentencing Guidelines) and the removal of any corporate monitor requirement. In the DOJ’s opinion, specifying the benefits of voluntary self-disclosure provides transparency in the process and, thus, more certainty for companies when they are deciding whether to self-report.
In exchange for these potential benefits, however, the DOJ requires (1) truly voluntary self-disclosure; (2) full cooperation with federal authorities in the ensuing investigation; and (3) rapid remediation of any flaws in the company’s compliance program.70 Moreover, these Pilot Program requirements are in addition to those imposed under the Principles of Federal Prosecution of Business Organizations set forth in the U.S. Attorneys’ Manual71 and under the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, both of which speak to the steps that companies must….
Read Full Article in the June 2016 Issue of Life Science Compliance Update