Revisiting the Early History of the FCPA

When enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) was paused in February 2025, ethics and compliance attorney Severin Wirz, previously with TRACE and now at Applied Materials, was finalizing a 10-year project on the law’s history. His resulting November 2025 book, Bribery Beyond Borders: The Story of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, truly meets this current moment. In this first of a two-part series from our recent conversation, I examine Wirz’s recounting of the key elements of the FCPA story.

Rather than documenting nearly 40 years of FCPA cases, Wirz told me, he wanted to “set the record straight” about the roots of the law. The prevailing view, Wirz explained, was first, that the impetus for the FCPA was that the SEC uncovered widespread instances of bribery in connection with Watergate, and second, relatedly that the FCPA was a “knee-jerk reaction” to Watergate, as the body politic was consumed with what Vice President Spiro Agnew called in his resignation speech “post-Watergate morality.” But, Wirz told me, that version of events gets “the protagonists and the theory of change wrong.”

Wirz’s book shows that while the SEC did uncover many overseas bribes, the State Department and others often tried to block information from coming to light. Investigative journalists played a critical role in uncovering those stories. Thus, the FCPA’s history is better understood as “bottom-up, not top-down,” he told me. As he writes, “This top-down approach belies the FCPA’s own endogenous beginnings,” helping explain why it has proven difficult to transfer the FCPA to other countries. Additionally, Wirz shows by unearthing the slow process of passing the law, how – far from a quick reaction to Watergate – the FCPA was the product of “much longer geopolitical and anticorruption trends.”

The book explores the lengthy legislative effort that led to the FCPA. As Wirz writes, “passage of the FCPA some fifty years ago was itself without guarantees.” For example, Wirz details the various debates regarding how the law would function in practice. There was much skepticism about a model built on criminalization; many thought that forcing companies to disclose foreign bribes would be a more effective approach. Wirz told me, “No one thought you could actually bring these cases to court and backers of disclosure thought individual countries would bring their own cases in their own courts.” Wirz explained, “It took the signing of deferred prosecution agreements in the 1990s for the criminalization model to work out better than expected.”

The book also details the ways in which pushback against the FCPA began almost as soon as the law was passed, showing how voices ranging from the business community to President Reagan sought to water down the law. The common – and by now familiar – argument was that American firms were overregulated and supposedly at a competitive disadvantage overseas. The book helps the reader understand that the FCPA has always been on more tenuous ground than previously understood. While Wirz could not have known, when he began his research, just how timely his book would prove to be, he told me he had long sensed that the FCPA ground was shifting, and thus we should not have been surprised by the White House’s recent moves. 

Marc Schleifer

Governance, Democracy and Economic Development Expert