Homer Moyer and James Tillen comment on heightened FCPA enforcement, particularly in the context of cross-border transactions. "It’s fair to say that the new wave of enforcement has produced a cultural change in which the level of attention paid to this law by US companies is dramatically different than it was 10 or 15 years ago," says Moyer. "If a company has branch offices, employees, consultants or agencies anywhere in the world, the FCPA goes where they go," says Moyer. "If a company retains a sales rep on the other side of the world, for example, and that sales rep bribes a government official, the company could be liable even though it didn’t tell the sales rep to do anything of the sort." Moyer adds that most offenses involve third-party intermediaries to some degree. "The law was intentionally written this way because Congress wanted to avoid situations where a company contracted with a third party and then turned a blind eye to whether or not bribes were being paid," he says.

Tillen discusses FCPA risks in US-Canada cross-border transactions. "Canada gets better ratings on corruption indices than the US does," says Tillen. "But there are still risks, bearing in mind events like the sponsorship scandal involving the federal government some years ago."