FCPA Report Turns to Manatt Partner for FCPA Training Tips
"FCPA Training That Works: An Interview with Jacqueline C. Wolff"
The FCPA Report
May 1, 2013 - The FCPA Report interviewed Manatt's Jacqueline C. Wolff on a wide range of topics, including: special considerations applicable to training different categories of employees; when to train third parties; the role of outside counsel in training; the interaction between attorney-client privilege issues and candor during training; the risks of online training; appropriate training frequency; the role of hypotheticals; minimizing cost without sacrificing effectiveness; and training lessons from the November 2012 Guidance.
When asked who should be trained and what are the factors that go into that decision, Wolff said:
"The best anti-corruption policies and procedures will mean nothing if no one in the company understands them or why they are important. Therefore, ideally, everyone in the company should be trained. But, in fact, when deciding who gets trained, companies have to do the same sort of risk analysis that they would do in designing any part of a compliance program.
The reason I say 'ideally, everyone' is that it is important that every employee with exposure to foreign government officials or other anti-corruption risks be trained. Training only individuals who are currently exposed to FCPA risks may leave gaps in the company's training coverage. This is because in any company, people move to different positions. For example, imagine a company has somebody working purely domestically today and tomorrow they are shipped overseas. All of a sudden they are dealing with foreign officials. If the company conducts two annual training sessions and a job change happens between those sessions, the person wouldn't have gotten any kind of training and they are off to a foreign country knowing nothing about the FCPA.
To address this problem, the company could train each person individually when they go abroad. However, if it is a large, multi-national company and people are moving around a lot from one country to the next or moving from working domestically to overseas, it is probably more cost-effective to train everyone annually rather than cherry-picking who should be trained."