By
Matthew Richardson
 |
DOJ Headquarters, Washington D.C.
|
The average
person has an instinctive understanding of the fact that when an act of corruption
occurs, some individual somewhere, an actual human being, must be responsible.
If a company pays bribes to get contracts, or submits false documents and an
official looks the other way, or does shoddy work and is never held to account,
we recognize that there must have been somebody, somewhere, who was aware or
should have been aware of the misconduct and did the wrong thing. This is part
of why so many continue to be upset that the financial institutions that helped
bring about the 2009 financial crisis are widely recognized to have behaved improperly,
but individuals were never really held to
account.
It’s in
this context that so many people concerned about corruption in US international
commercial transactions have expressed such interest in the Yates Memo, so called because of Deputy
Attorney General Sally Yates’ authorship. The Yates Memo is an example of
messaging by the Department of Justice, broadcasting for all intents and
purposes, that they get it – it’s not good enough to fine large
institutions and publicize evidence of institutional
misconduct. No, the Yates Memo is an effort by the DOJ to put large
multinational corporations and the FCPA defense bar on notice that the DOJ
wants to start coming after you, and they want to put an individual’s name next
to a fined corporation and say “we got the one who did it!”
