Many have speculated about finding a single cause for the explosion of FCPA enforcement after 2004, including myself. The death last month of Mike Oxley, the House of Representatives sponsor of legislation known as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX), caused me to think yet again about the variety of factors that led to this growth in enforcement.
SOX was passed in direct response to the fraud and accounting scandals perpetrated on the U.S. public by Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, and others in the 1990s and the first decade of this century. Yet in the FCPA world, SOX is significant as well. Many have speculated that the requirements for corporate certifications of financial statements led to greater corporate internal investigations and subsequent disclosures of corporate wrongdoing. This may have led to increased discovery of foreign bribery in violation of the FCPA, a greater number of self-disclosures to the Justice Department, and then to the increased enforcement of the FCPA from 2004 forward.
