On 10 February 2025 an executive order paused new investigations and enforcement actions under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, with limited exceptions, while the Attorney General conducted a review lasting one hundred and eighty days. Five days earlier, a departmental memorandum had already redirected the enforcement unit towards bribery connected to cartels and transnational criminal organizations.
On 10 June 2025 the Deputy Attorney General issued guidelines for investigations and enforcement under the Act, ending the pause. The guidelines direct prosecutors towards conduct causing identifiable harm to United States interests, towards individual wrongdoing, and away from extended examinations of companies where there is no evidence of systemic problems.
A number of organizations read the first announcement as the risk receding, and adjusted accordingly. The second announcement arrived four months later, which is a short interval in the life of a compliance program and a long one in the life of a decision.
What a policy pause does not touch
Enforcement policy is not the same thing as law. The Act remained in force throughout, conduct occurring during the pause remained chargeable afterwards, and the limitation period comfortably outlives any single policy cycle. An organization that relaxed a control in February 2025 created exposure that a later administration can examine at leisure.
The accounting provisions are the more common trap in any event. Books and records requirements and internal controls requirements are separate obligations, they do not depend on proving a bribe, and they are the provisions most companies actually breach.
Enforcement policy changed twice within four months. The statute, the limitation period and the reach of other jurisdictions were unaffected by either change.
Nobody else paused
The United States is one of several jurisdictions with long reach over foreign bribery, and the others made no corresponding change. The United Kingdom, France and Brazil each retain their own extraterritorial provisions, and the same conduct is frequently chargeable in more than one place.
An organization with any European footprint should read the United Kingdom position alongside the American one, and the relevant point is not only the Bribery Act. The failure to prevent fraud offense that came into force on 1 September 2025 reaches conduct connected to the United Kingdom regardless of where the organization sits, and its only defense is procedures documented before the fact.
Read together, the two developments point in opposite directions, and an organization that responded to the American change alone has moved the wrong way.
Where the exposure concentrates
- Third parties acting in the organization’s interest. Agents, distributors and consultants create liability without appearing on the payroll, and commission-only arrangements in difficult markets carry the incentive the statutes contemplate.
- Payments that look unremarkable on their own. Facilitation payments, expedited licensing, hospitality and charitable contributions rarely look like bribery in a single ledger entry, and the pattern is only visible in aggregate.
- Acquisitions and the history that comes with them. Successor liability means an acquirer inherits the target’s history at completion, whatever the enforcement climate was when the conduct occurred.
- The description in the books and records. How a payment was described internally is frequently the element that is easiest to prove and hardest to explain.
The United Kingdom, France and Brazil each retain their own extraterritorial reach, and the same conduct is frequently chargeable in more than one place.
Acquisitions are where this becomes concrete
The clearest commercial consequence sits in transactions. An acquirer takes on what the target did before completion, and the diligence window is the last point at which the position can be priced or walked away from.
Anti-corruption work in mergers and acquisitions support is therefore about establishing what a target has actually been doing in its difficult markets rather than confirming that it holds a policy. Those enquiries take time that transaction timetables rarely allow, which is the reason they are usually done badly or late.
Where the diligence period genuinely does not permit it, the useful alternative is a documented post-completion program with a defined scope and deadline, since a recorded intention to look is a materially better position than an absence of any record.
What is worth doing while policy is unsettled
The durable version of this work does not track enforcement priorities, because priorities move faster than programs can be rebuilt. It establishes where the organization is exposed and keeps the evidence of that assessment current.
Practical FCPA consulting at this point means reviewing the third-party population, testing a sample of payments against their stated purpose, and recording what was examined and when. That record is what answers the question a future enforcer will ask, which is not whether the organization had a policy but whether it was paying attention.
Our Book of the Month shelf has the International Handbook of White-Collar Crime, which is useful for the sheer breadth of the enforcement picture, and Billion Dollar Whale, which remains the most readable account of what inadequate diligence looks like from the inside.
The question for a board
If enforcement resumed at full intensity next quarter, which of the last three years of payments would you want reviewed first, and could you produce the record of who approved them and why?
Falcone International
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