bribe

Seven companies involved in the oil and gas industries will pay the U.S. government a total of $236.5 million to settle corruption charges. An investigation by the SEC and the Justice Department alleges that the companies bribed overseas officials to lower customs duties, extend drilling contacts and streamline the permit process for oil drilling.

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act makes it illegal for companies to pay foreign officials to get or retain business, and the U.S. government has been stepping up FCPA enforcement actions: More than three times as many FCPA cases were brought in 2009 than were filed in 2005.

The Department of Justice may file suit Tuesday over Arizona's controversial immigration law, but if the lawsuit is crafted as has been rumored, it will frustrate all sides in the debate, because it avoids the merits of the law and focuses instead on Arizona's lack of authority to enact it.

As the conflict in Afghanistan drags on, the U.S. has announced that the troubled Asian nation is sitting on upwards of $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits. However, the resources are likely to end up getting mined not by American but by Russian and Chinese firms.

Paying kids to do schoolwork is a very successful method to inspire better grades, better behavior, and most objectively: better test scores. That's the result of years of controversial work by a team of economists, and what's more, some really happy kids. Harvard economics professor Roland...

Last week we reported that Amazon's customer service department deleted a review that told about a seller's attempts at bribery and the damage this action can do to product ratings. Like all of Amazon's blunders, this one appears to have been a misunderstanding. The Consumerist reports that Amazon...

With more and more purchases being made online, product reviews on major e-commerce sites like Amazon.com have quickly become more important to a product's success than expensive ad campaigns. This value hasn't gone unnoticed by online retailers, who have quickly made user reviews a a standard...

Cash4Gold, the scrap gold buyer that recently hired Ed McMahon and MC Hammer to pitch their service during the Super Bowl, was busted by a blogger named Rob Cockerham at Cockeyed.com for offering one-third of the appraised value for scrap gold and then trying to bribe him to remove the story from...

A court in India sentenced a 75-year-old doctor to three months in jail for accepting a 51-cent bribe 24 years ago. Talk about crime not paying. Balgovind Prasad accepted the 25 rupees, or 51 cents, from a sweeper in 1985 for issuing a fake medical certificate, police told Reuters. The...

I've been reading a lot about ethics lately and have been interested to see how game theory (think A Beautiful Mind and little tic-tac-toe grids with choices for each of the 'players' as column and row headings) affects our choices as parents. It turns out that ethics are taught at home, not at...