- Hi, everyone. We're going to be talking about a really easy subject today, bribery. The Bible condemns
bribery in multiple verses but what exactly is bribery? What is that even defined as being? The verses generally talk
about bribery as paying someone to pervert justice, to
bring about a result that you wouldn't otherwise get. Bribing a judge to rule a
certain way in a court proceeding comes to mind. If you look at bribery
in a legal dictionary, it'll say this, the offering, giving, receiving
or soliciting of something of value for the purpose of
influencing the action of an official in the discharge of
his or her public legal duties. But in business, what do we do
with the fact that in certain international environments,
bribery, depending on how you define it, is just
the way business is done? Do we withdraw as Christians
from all those areas where that's the case? Do we go with the idea of when
in Rome do as the Romans do and go along with it? Aren't there laws against bribery? And while we're at it, what exactly is wrong with bribery anyway? Why are we so against it,
what's the problem with it? So we'll talk about those a little bit. Let me set this up in this
way, what would you do if you were faced with this,
it's your job, you're hired to set up internet coffeehouses
in a developing country. You're asked to set them up
in a certain period of time but when you come to actually
the point where you're getting things done, you find
out that it's going to take six to nine months to get
electricity and telephones going. And your boss and your
supervisor tell you, "That's not gonna work. We have to have this coffeehouse
set up way before that." So you talk to some people and find out the recognized procedure
in that particular country that if you pay a
government official $1,000 in recognition of his official status, that will speed up and
you'll get those things, electricity or phones, immediately. Well, what do you do? Do you do that or do
you not do that and why? When you object a bit, your
supervisor says, "Why don't you take off your red, white and
blue glasses a little bit. That's the way things
are done in this country. Don't stand back and be critical until you fully understand
what's happening." So do you do it? Is this what's ethically
impermissible in the Bible? Is this the kind of thing
that the Bible talks about? Or what about this one? This happened to me. You're in a country behind the
Iron Curtain, which no longer exists but once did, with
your wife and two children. You're not supposed to be
there, I'll probably leave it at that, and you're pulled over by police. They figure out pretty
quickly that you're Americans and through your translator
they say, "We'll let you go if you pay us $50 in US
currency immediately, right here, right now. And if you don't, we're
going to take you," meaning the dad, the husband, me, "someplace where your
family's not gonna see you for a long time and they're
gonna be left without you." Well, what do you do? Do you pay that? Is it ethically proper to pay that? Would we call that a bribe in the sense of the Bible prohibiting bribery? As a lawyer, I deal with the
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act sometimes and some of its
provisions may surprise you a bit. For instance, it does not
prohibit sums to officials whose duties are ministerial
in order to accelerate the performance of an administrative service. Basically it's called grease
money and what it talks about is the speeding up of something
to which you would otherwise be entitled, you just get it faster. That is not considered a bribe. The definition of bribe
does not include that in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. So in the internet coffeehouse
case we were just talking about, under that Act at least,
that would not be a bribe. There would be nothing
illegal about paying that fee for faster service, if you will. And when you think about
it, it makes sense. I mean, are we committing
bribery that's prohibited in the Bible when we hire FedEx
to deliver something faster than the US Postal Service? Or when we hire a passport
company to get our passport renewed a bit faster,
when we pay a premium for faster service? Probably not. Bribery, I would suggest
this, the way to think of bribery and that which is
not permitted Scripturally, is the payment for something which you otherwise would not get, a business opportunity which
you otherwise would not get. You pay $50,000 to have
a government contract awarded to your company. That's not speeding up something you'd otherwise be entitled to. That's creating the entire
business opportunity with paying somebody for it. That's the kind of thing,
that's the perversion of justice and the taking things out
of the proper ethical track that the Bible prohibits. Why are we opposed to bribery? I brought that up a few minutes ago. It's interesting sometimes
to ask people in a group, "We have laws against bribery, why?" Sometimes the room falls
deadly silent at that time. The reason is from a business
standpoint, I can tell you, there are a lot of studies
on this and the quality of business generally declines
in areas where the awarding of business is given on the
basis of who has the most money. When you award contracts, you
award business opportunities for reasons other than merit, other than who has the best product, who
provides the best service, the quality of business
will go down overall. The economic life will go down
overall in those countries and there are studies bearing that out. So that's one of the certainly
practical effects of bribery and why we want to avoid it. When we discuss the ethics of bribery, it's helped me to have a diagram. And on the left, you'll
see there is a gift. Coming across, you then have a premium, then you have a tip, then you have a bribe and
then you have extortion. The gift, to define
that, is something like if I have a client that's given me a lot of work over the years, I will give them something as a thank you with no expectation of anything in return. That's a true gift, the fact
that there's no expectation of something coming back. If it's a premium, I would
suggest that's a better word than a bribe for what we were discussing with the internet coffeehouse. The speeding up of services,
paying for faster services, paying a premium for that, I
would suggest is not a bribe. Now, when you get into a tip,
that's closer on the diagram to a bribe and there's a reason for that. The acronym, tip, many
people don't realize, T-I-P-S, tips, to ensure prompt service or some people say to
ensure proper service. Well, what does that say? If you're ensuring prompt
service in the future, that means you don't pay a
tip at the end of your meal. You pay a tip at the beginning. Well if you go to a show, let's say, and someone taking the
tickets as you go in, says, "I'll put you in the
front two rows for $50." I could call that a tip, a
tip to ensure prompt service, but it's feeling a lot like a bribe, creating a business opportunity. So the true meaning of
tip, paying it in advance, is probably more like a bribe, a tip at a restaurant, not so much. Then you go over to extortion. I would suggest that the
behind the Iron Curtain story that I told you. That's extortion. I wouldn't even call that a bribe. I would say it's ethically improper. This is an easy one actually. Ethically improper to demand extortion but not ethically improper to pay it. In that case if I had not paid
it, what would have happened to my family would have been
far worse, far more difficult to justify ethically. If I take a client to lunch. I've represented automotive
companies in the past. If I go up and take a whole
legal department to lunch and I have no expectation in return, I would say that's a gift. That's a thank you. However, if I go, and even
in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, there should
be some quid pro quo here. If I take you all to lunch, do I get some new cases from you? Then you've crossed over, I think. Then you're more in a bribe situation. In an extortion situation
reminds me of a professor that I teach ethics with. He said on his honeymoon,
he came back from Mexico and in the airport flying
home, they let his wife through and then she stood there but
they didn't let him through. They said, "If you want to get
through, empty your pockets." And so he did and I would
say there's nothing ethically improper about emptying your
pockets and paying extortion, because that's what that is. We would suggest that the
meaningful distinction in this area is between a
premium and an actual bribe. If you're talking about
speeding up something to which you would otherwise
be entitled, we would suggest that's a premium and not impermissible in Biblical ethical principles. If you are paying for
a business opportunity that you would not otherwise
get, that, we would say, is the bribery that
Scripture regards askance and we would as well. The former, the premium, not a bribe. The latter would pervert
justice and would be a bribe. So hopefully that's
helpful to you here today.
