Related Practices
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After a series of high profile scandals involving lobbyists, gifts to government officials and campaign finance violations, many corporations have expanded the focus of their compliance programs to include government relations risk. When problems are detected, Covington frequently is engaged to conduct internal investigations aimed at understanding what happened, why it happened, and what step the company needs to take to remediate any political law violations. Increasingly, corporations proactively engage our Election & Political Law group to conduct audits or reviews of their Washington offices and their overall government affairs compliance.
The typical politically active corporation faces a variety of potential compliance risks in the political law area. Examples include:
- Illegal reimbursement of campaign contributions through the corporate expense reimbursement process.
- Illegal bundling or “facilitation” of campaign contributions by corporate employees and lobbyists.
- Failure to register lobbyists.
- Failure accurately to quantify and report lobbying activity.
- Violation of corporate policies or laws governing gifts to public officials.
- Mishandling of PAC funds.
We understand that investigations of this kind are necessarily extraordinarily sensitive in nature. Our lawyers are able to marshal not only the investigative skills and professional discretion necessary to learn the facts but also the specialized knowledge of the election and lobbying laws needed to spot and understand the issues.
Representative Matters
- We have recently conducted several highly confidential, large corporate internal investigations for Fortune 500 companies concerning campaign finance, Lobbying Disclosure Act, and Foreign Agents Registration compliance issues. We utilized a team approach involving both our election law subject matter specialists and our white collar/government investigations lawyers. We were able rapidly to ascertain the facts and evaluate the corporations’ legal exposure for corporate management, as well as to make practical recommendations for remediation.
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