Tags: Anti-Bribery & Corruption (ABC)
On 10 February 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing his Attorney General to pause enforcement of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) for 180 days.
The 1977 law prohibits US companies and individuals from bribing foreign officials to gain business advantages. The new US administration has suggested that – as currently enforced - the FCPA hampers American businesses' competitiveness and national security interests. Attorney General Pam Bondi has been directed to develop new enforcement guidelines to "restore proper bounds on FCPA enforcement and preserve Presidential foreign policy prerogatives”.
Ethical leadership and values-based decision-making require consideration of strategic and long-term impacts and scenarios from here.
When all firms act ethically regarding bribery and corruption, it is generally agreed that the corporate environment improves – raising opportunity whilst lowering costs and risks for all. The consistency of the approach matters, and as a result, regulation has an important role to play in raising standards. Anti-corruption efforts are a textbook example of the role of regulation in changing behaviour.
At the same time values-led organisations that raise the bar on any issue (moving ahead of regulations, for example) can set standards and often by doing so raise business practices across the system – often benefiting their people, other firms, business partners, communities and governments in the process.
Even though US Department of Justice (DOJ) enforcement is paused, the FCPA is still law, and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) continues civil enforcement. For global businesses, it’s part of a suite of rules across the world from the UK’s Bribery Act (2010) to Sapin II (France) and the Anti-Unfair Competition Law (China). These laws exist alongside others, including the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials and the UN Convention against Corruption. Therefore, companies should maintain and continue to monitor compliance.
There are some who think that this could increase the risk of corruption, such as Mark Pieth, a professor at the University of Basel, who has suggested that Trump’s move could prompt other countries to weaken their anti-bribery laws, leading to a global decline in ethical business standards.
It is unclear exactly where this will go from here.
What is clear, however, rather than viewing anti-bribery and corruption solely as a legal risk that disappears when the rules change, the best ethical leaders consider enduring principles and imagine future scenarios from here and the benefits and risks of long-term commitments to fair competition, transparency and political engagement.
In the short term there are practical steps that companies can consider to protect integrity and ethical culture during this uncertain period:
- Ethical leadership: based on clear principles and consistent alignment with values to navigate through the uncertainty and consider future scenarios.
- Ethical culture: ethics programmes including training on anti-bribery aligned to policies and principles, a clear & high-quality code of ethics, protections for those who speak up combined with strong whistleblowing safeguards
- Maintain and monitor compliance: corruption and bribery risks increase based on context and in certain countries and industries where corruption is more common; companies need to ensure they are maintaining and monitoring compliance.