Competing Anti-Corruption Strategies for ensuring Integrity in Public Contracts: U.S. and EU systems compared

The aim of the article is to analyze two different models for fighting public contract corruption in a comparative perspective, and to evaluate their outcomes. This article first analyzes the U.S. compliance and ethics program as a general anti-corruption model. According to U.S. criminal law, corporations are accountable for their employees’ crimes. However, they may prevent corporate criminal liability by adopting and enforcing effective compliance programs, provided with a code of conduct and other anti-corruption tools. The overall effect of the implementation of these compliance programs has been a strong prevention of criminal conduct, such as bribery, and the establishment of a good corporate citizenship model. Public contract law has gone even further by implementing this corporate anti-corruption model as a benchmark for contractors. The compliance program is now required ex lege, as a mandatory element of a public procurement contractor. Moreover, contractors that neglect to have an effective compliance program expose themselves to the risk of being debarred from the public contract market. Indeed, the U.S. model pushes corporations that want to deal with the Federal Government to the highest ethical standards and reaching the highest integrity possible in the public contract market.