Argumentative Essay On Fpa Act

After the Watergate, a political scandal which led to the impeachment of the President, Richard Nixon at the time, due to the exposures of the corporate payments that were considered bribery, stimulated Congress to pass the Foreign Corrupt Payments Act (FCPA) in 1977. FCPA has two methods in preventing bribery: disclosure and criminalization. Due to the public uproar, Congress thought that passing a law that makes corporations disclose all payments that could be potentially be viewed as bribery, this law would prevent it. American people started opposing the Act immediately after it passed. They were arguing that it attacked the morals, and possibly reduce American corporate attractiveness internationally (Sheffet, 1995) (p.290).
Questions

The Justice Department (DOJ) was already in a year long investigation into pharmaceutical industry. This is very big because of the of the large number of clinical trials done overseas, and the percentage of drugs that are approved in the U.S. due to these clinical trials. Merck, a very big American pharmaceutical company, and one of the largest in the world, disclosed in its SEC filing that it was under investigation for the FCPA act. Many other major companies such as AstraZeneca, Baxter, Bristol-Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer, receives at least an inquiry letter regarding their practices outside the U.S. (Andersen, 2010) (p.2). Below is a chart of known investigations against companies by industry and against individuals (Miller & Chevalier, 2015).The key FCPA legislation dictates any U.S. company that uses travel, gifts and entertainment to market its offerings to potential customers internationally must obey and understand the accounting and anti-bribery points of the act. Specifically, the act concentrates on illegal interstate business that offers bribery to any foreign entity to gain improper advantage (Boedecker, 2011)