Categories: Third Party Anti-Corruption

A major mutual fund company was concerned that they did not have complete visibility into what extent their various mutual fund investments included state-owned companies and/or investments in industries or entities with operations that were subject to U.S. Department of Treasury restrictions as enforced by the Office of Foreign Assets Control.  The team worked with a vendor that specialized in public company data aggregation and was able to query their entire repository of publicly traded companies on each stock exchange in the world and batch process the entire list against OFAC's various restrictive trading lists and a proprietary list of state-owned companies.   The results of this intensive batch processing exercise provided the Chief Compliance Officer with critical information about the state of the company's OFAC and Foreign Corrupt Practices Act compliance programsand enabled him to strengthen those compliance programs based upon what was learned.

In connection with ongoing negotiations with U.S. and Brazilian law enforcement and regulators, a Brazil-based aerospace and defense company needed assistance in the design, implementation and administration of their third-party anti-corruption program, the centerpiece of their newly revamped anti-bribery and corruption compliance program.  The team worked with compliance leadership to inventory the various categories of third party, isolate the intermediaries, harmonize the taxonomy used to describe the various intermediaries and develop a tailored risk scoring methodology that considered country, relationship, relationship size, nexus to government officials and state-owned entities and government agencies, watchlist findings and adverse disclosures.  The team also designed the entire onboarding work flow to include business sponsor forms, third party questionnaires, risk scoring, watchlist screening, investigative due diligence requisitions and fulfillment, interpretation of results, follow-up actions and decisioning.  The company's third party anti-corruption program and other actions it took enabled them to enter into a favorable settlement with Brazilian and U.S. enforcement authorities.