Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Alexandra Rogge, and today my guest is Kara Brockmeyer.

Kara has been a partner at Debevoise in Plympton since May of last year. Prior to joining Debevoise, she served as the chief of the FCPA unit at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Kara, thank you for joining me. It's always a pleasure to catch up with you.

Oh, it's a pleasure to be here.

The FCPA is jointly enforced by the DOJ and the SEC.

Can you explain how that works as a practical matter?

I think that's particularly helpful for listeners outside the United States.

The FCPA is one of the rare security statutes that actually has joint jurisdiction built in.

So the SEC has jurisdiction, civil jurisdiction, over issuers.

So public companies, any company that trades stock in the U.S.

or otherwise has to issue periodic reports, annual or quarterly reports with the SEC.

And DOJ has criminal jurisdiction over those companies. And then DOJ has both civil and criminal

jurisdiction over anyone else who falls outside the category of an issuer or their employees, agents, shareholders, directors, officers of an issuer.

So a domestic company, a domestic U.S. person who is not affiliated with an issuer or a foreign national,

not affiliated with an issuer who comes to the U.S. and violates the FCPA while they're

in the territory of the U.S.

Based on that description, it's pretty clear that the SEC's enforcement mandate is different

than the DOJs. How did those priorities play out as a

practical matter? So I think it's important to remember that the SEC is a regulatory as opposed to

a law enforcement body. And their primary focus is on protecting investors and ensuring the sort of the quality

of the financial reports and the disclosures that public companies make. And so the SEC is a civil

regulatory agency is more likely to take action on smaller cases involving issuers, where the

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