In October 2021, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco announced revised US Department of Justice (DOJ) guidance on corporate monitorships, signaling a sharp change in the declining trend of the tool over the past few years. (NRF has previously examined the DOJ’s policy changes.) Recently, the DOJ and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that their parallel investigations of a transnational medical waste services company had ended, with the company set to pay over US$84 million to the agencies for violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) arising out of a multi-jurisdictional bribery scheme. Included in the terms of the Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA) is a requirement for the company to engage an independent compliance monitor for two years. According to the DOJ in publicly filed documents, the company was a victim of its own global success; when expanding into Latin America, it failed to sufficiently account for the implementation and scaling of internal accounting controls to prevent or detect misconduct. The DOJ stated that in the absence of sufficient controls, the company paid over US$10.5 million in bribes to foreign officials in Brazil, Mexico and Argentina to promote and benefit their business.
Read the full update here.