Despite the hoopla surrounding the Wal-Mart case, corporate bribery of public officials remains an all too common practice in many countries around the world, according to the most recent annual report by Transparency International, a Berlin-based nonprofit with more than 100 chapters around the world. The organization's Corruption Perceptions Index 2011 charges that many governments in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East still fail to protect their citizens from the abuse of public resources, bribery and secretive decision-making. Among them, Mexico is hardly the worst offender on the list.
For all the dissatisfaction expressed in that report, corruption experts generally agree that multinational executives in the U.S. and other countries are taking anti-corruption statutes more seriously than in the past. One reason is the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, which imposes serious penalties on U.S. companies that bribe foreign officials. In addition, a growing number of executives recognize that bribery is not only ethically wrong, but economically counter-productive.
