Company Cooperation and U.S. Sentencing Guidelines

Abstract

The U.S. Sentencing Commission has changed how the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines calculate fines for certain defendant companies. The amendments, effective November 1, 2010, make more readily available a long-standing three-level offense-level reduction. This change shifts the inquiry away from (1) the (mis)conduct of the company’s high-level personnel and toward (2) the effectiveness of the company’s compliance and ethics program. This move will surely benefit corporate defendants. Therefore, it is something for which compliance professionals and in-house legal counsel need to both understand and prepare. As the benefits of incentivizing companies to adopt proactive compliance, ethics, and self-reporting programs gain wider recognition, other countries eager to beef up their anti-bribery efforts can be expected to follow suit.