FEATURE
Whole-of-Government and Corporate Compliance By KENJI M. PRICE AND DEAN A. PINKERT strategic competition with China and climate change, and offer compliance and corporate governance recommendations.
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ackling the nation’s problems with a wholeof-government (WoG) approach is a common refrain lately in statements by U.S. executive branch officials. Invoked in presidential memoranda, executive orders and regulatory actions, it certainly appears to be the public policy approach du jour. The concept itself is simple: It involves federal departments and agencies addressing high priority problems through enhanced collaboration, information-sharing and coordinated effort that, where
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necessary and appropriate, crosses jurisdictional and operational boundaries. When the U.S. government employs the WoG approach to address a problem, corporate counsel should pay very close attention, taking heed of both the concerns that gave rise to the WoG initiative and the means chosen to address those concerns. In this article, we discuss why WoG initiatives should be top of mind for corporate counsel, using as examples the Biden administration’s approach to addressing
The dynamic and systemic concerns raised by U.S. authorities — including allegations that China is attempting to become the world’s only superpower by any means necessary and that it engages in state-sponsored trade secret theft, economic espionage, and “forced” technology transfer with respect to inbound foreign investments — are serious and call for a careful risk-mitigation strategy that balances security threats known to industry against broader concerns expressed by U.S. authorities. Regarding those broader concerns, the imperatives of national security are likely to loom large in U.S. countermeasures, making decisions that affect a growing range of commercial activities more opaque and less predictable. A recent example is enactment of the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2018, which expands the scope of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States’ review of certain foreign investments in U.S. companies — a process that involves review of non-public information submitted to an inter-agency committee — and BACK TO CONTENTS
