CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER
FBI’s
Burrus Deploying Agents to Ferret Out Foreign Bribery
20 Corporate Crime Reporter 42(1), October 26, 2006
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has a new target – major American
corporations that commit foreign bribery.
The head of the FBI”s Criminal Division, Chip Burrus, said this week that he has deployed agents to investigate foreign bribes paid by major U.S. corporations.
“One up and coming area is the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act,” Burrus said in an interview with Corporate Crime Reporter. “This is a priority that we haven’t focused a lot on, but now we are.”
Burrus said he’s assigning some agents from the FBI’s Washington field office to the Fraud Section at Main Justice “to take a hard look at these foreign bribery cases.”
Burrus oversees the FBI’s criminal division, with its 5,500 agents and $1 billion budget.
Of those 5,500 agents, Burrus says that 1,800 are devoted to white collar crime – 600 specifically to public corruption and 262 to corporate fraud.
He ranks the FBI’s white collar priorities as – public corruption, corporate fraud, health care fraud and bank fraud.
Burrus says that public corruption cases are up since 2004 because he has directed resources to that area.
“In 2004, I got together with all of our public corruption agents here at headquarters and we devised a couple of strategies to let field offices know number one – here’s how you do these cases – and number two – you are going to get support from us in the form of money, agents and manpower if you do these,” Burrus said. “That has really jump-started the program. And now, the more agents look, the more they find. And that’s where we should be.”
While the FBI puts out every year a Crime in the United States report that focuses almost exclusively on street crime, no equivalent public report exists for white collar crime.
Burrus agreed that such a public report would be helpful in attacking the problem.
But he said that the FBI has its own internal tracking numbers that show, for example, that the number corporate fraud criminal cases has increased 16 percent in the last two months.
He says that there are 486 corporate fraud cases being investigated this year.
When asked whether he would turn over the FBI’s internal numbers on white collar crime to the Corporate Crime Reporter, Burrus says – “those are not public.”
“No, you can’t have the cases, I’m sorry,” he says. “We do track these internally to determine what the trends are.”
“In response to a specific interview, I try and get together some numbers,” he says. “But cases aren’t everything. Cases don’t necessarily reflect some of the intelligence that you are picking up.”
(For a complete transcript of the Interview with Chip Burrus, see 20 Corporate Crime Reporter 42(11), October 30, 2006, print edition only.)
Corporate
Crime Reporter
1209 National Press Bldg.
Washington, D.C. 20045
202.737.1680