Investigations, Enforcement, & Compliance Alerts

The growing economic and political tension between the U.S. and China has placed multinationals with operations in China in a tenuous position – comply with U.S. sanctions laws, and in return, suffer economic backlash, or worse, from the Chinese government or consumers.

On February 1, 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”) released its annual False Claims Act (“FCA”) recovery statistics and announced that it had obtained more than $5.6 billion in settlements and judgments in fiscal year 2021 from civil cases involving fraud and false claims against the government.  This total—which was driven by record-breaking recoveries in the health care industry, a traditional leading area for FCA recoveries—is more than double the amount recovered in the previous fiscal year and marks the second-highest annual total ever, behind only the approximately $6.1 billion recovered in fiscal year 2014.  The significant increase in 2021 recoveries reverses a downward trend in the totals obtained by the DOJ during the previous couple of years.  A careful analysis of the statistics and announcements demonstrates that the FCA continues to be a powerful tool supporting one of the DOJ’s “top priorities”—combatting fraud in an ever-expanding array of industries doing business with the government—and reveals what to expect in FCA enforcement in the coming years, from both the government and whistleblowers.

On November 26, 2021, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (the “OECD”) updated its anti-bribery recommendation for the first time in more than a decade. More than 44 countries have ratified the OECD’s 1997 Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions (the “Convention”), which establishes standards that signatories must meet and steps they must take to combat global corruption.