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What's The Count?

Some weekend. We should've expected it since the calendar says mid-October. That always means one thing, or maybe two. The sky is falling on Wall Street . . . and the American League Championship Series is in full swing, literally. In Game 2, seven home runs in five innings. Five hours and 27 minutes of pure tension. Great baseball, even if outside the park the Anglo-American capitalist model was facing extinction (according to some voices from the Eurozone).

But coming back to our subject of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a reader last week with an eye for detail asked the following:

I have a question about how DOJ and SEC provide numbers of prosecutions /enforcement actions for a particular year. First, when they say 2008, is it fiscal year (e.g., Oct. 2007-Oct. 2008) or calendar year? Second, do you know what they count as an action? I assume it is any indictment, plea agreement, DPA/NPA/or (in the case of the SEC) settlement or enforcement action filed, but not sentencing?

We can't answer for the SEC, but the Justice Department counts actions on a calendar year basis. The description in the question of what's included is correct. Any indictment, plea agreement, deferred prosecution agreement or non-prosecution agreement gets a number. There's no double counting, so sentencings do not get numbers because they're included from the time of charging or entry of the guilty plea.

If anyone would like to answer for the SEC, please drop us a line.

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Full post as published by The FCPA Blog on October 12, 2008 (boomark / email).