Corruption is Everywhere - Even in Walmarts All Over the World

Walmart Agrees to Pay $282M to Settle International Bribery Investigation

By Darryl Coote

Walmart agreed to pay  $282 million for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Photo by Ken Wolter/Shutterstock

(UPI) -- Walmart agreed to pay $282 million to settle a U.S. federal bribery investigation involving retailers in Mexico, China, Brazil and India, according to court filings.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said Thursday that it charged Walmart with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for failing to operate an anti-corruption program for more than a decade while the company experienced rapid international growth.

According to the complaint, filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, from July 2000 to April 2011, Walmart subsidiaries in those countries lacked an anti-corruption system and when the retail giant learned of certain corruption risks, it "did not either sufficiently investigate the allegations or sufficiently mitigate the known risks."

The lack of implementing a program and its failure to investigate corruption risks led to subsidiaries in those countries to employ third-party intermediaries who then made payments to government officials without "reasonable assurances" that they were within the FCPA, the statement said.

Walmart agreed to pay $144 million to settle the SEC's charges and $138 million to settle the parallel criminal charges filed by the U.S. Department of Justice.

"Walmart valued international growth and cost-cutting over compliance," said Charles Cain, chief of SEC Enforcement Division's FCPA Unit. "The company could have avoided many of these problems, but instead Walmart repeatedly failed to take red flags seriously and delayed the implementation of appropriate internal accounting controls."

Walmart President and CEO Doug McMillon said he is "pleased" the matter has been resolved.

"Walmart is committed to doing business the right way, and that means acting ethically everywhere we operate," he said in a statement. "We've enhanced our policies, procedures and systems and invested tremendous resources globally into ethics and compliance, and now have a strong Global Anti-Corruption Compliance Program."