Welcome back to bribes, windle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogge, and implausibly enough, today's guest is going to make the lesser-known

enforcement tools of suspension and debarment lively for us.

My guest is an assistant dean and lecturer

at George Washington Law School,

where she teaches a government contracts

anti-corruption and compliance seminar.

Prior to joining George Washington,

she was at Jenner & Block.

She's a senior editor with a very popular FCPA blog.

She writes prodigiously and speaks frequently

on corruption, compliance, suspension,

and debarment. Her legal commentary is sought out by major U.S. media outlets. Jessica Tilletman,

thanks so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. Happy to be here.

Why don't you start by describing these penalties for us and the rationale behind each?

So the first thing, I'm really happy that you asked me to describe it as a penalty

because not every single debarment regime views debarment or blacklisting or

suspension as a penalty. So that's probably one of the biggest misnomer's about the system

as a whole. I'll just describe this

in general. There's a variety of different systems of the ways that people can address this. You use

the word suspension, debarment, and blacklisting. They're often used interchangeably, but for purposes,

I think we can call it debarment. It really just means exclusion or banning from obtaining government contracts or

...