The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) and the joint World Bank/UN Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC) Stolen Asset Recovery (StAR) Initiative have proposed a standardized rubric for measuring the proceeds of active bribes all over the world in a new report released Monday afternoon. Government officials found guilty of bribery can be sanctioned in most countries through a legal system, but that process is less formalized when it comes to the beneficiaries of the bribes. Their profits are often many times higher than the bribe itself.
“A countries’ ability to seize and confiscate the gains from bribery is integral to the international fight against bribery and corruption,” Mark Pieth, the chair of the OECD Working Group on Bribery said in a press release. Pieth was appointed the Chairman of FIFA’s independent Good Governance Committee last week. He said that all countries that are party to the UN Convention Against Corruption and the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention are required to undertake these tasks.
In the study, “Identification and Quantification of the Proceeds of Bribery ,” experts analyzed and compared existing measurement frameworks in the US, UK, Indonesia, Germany, South Africa and Switzerland to be considered as starting points for countries who have yet to implement official measures for identifying and numerically quantifying how much money a briber makes as a result of his bribe and determining how much money can be fairly confiscated.
The report used examples from actual bribery cases to illustrate these procedures and show how governments successfully quantified and recovered criminal assets.
“This report is important because it is the first one that categorizes the main methods used in calculating ill-gotten gains across different legal systems,” StAR Coordinator Jean Pesme stressed. “In many countries, the idea of penalizing bribery is perceived as too complicated to be seriously pursued.” Pesne says that the report provides a set of practices describing “all potential scenarios” in practical terms for anti-bribery professionals.
The study acknowledges that there are a number of different existing methods for sanctioning, but having a unified legal system is of paramount importance. For example, US practitioners use a method based on net revenue to calculate penalties: a company would be ordered to pay the total cost of the contract, plus the cost of the bribe, minus the cost of the goods.
The United Kingdom uses the gross revenue method, in which the amount to be confiscated does not make adjustment for the cost of goods. For example, if a company paid a bribe of US$1.1 million and made a profit of US$9.1 million, the company would have to pay US$9.1 million.
