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• Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP

Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement accounted for nearly half of the $2 billion in settlements and judgments secured by the U.S. Justice Department’s Criminal Division last year.

Prosecutors in the Criminal Fraud Section secured $1 billion in penalties through FCPA enforcement in 2010, the most in the 33-year history of the foreign anti-bribery law, according to a DOJ news release.

The $1 billion number not only points to the increasingly aggressive FCPA enforcement at the Justice Department and SEC, which have begun to levy fines and disgorgements worth hundreds of millions of dollars with regularity. It also suggests that cracking down on the FCPA helps the Justice Department rack up good statistics.

At budget time, a law enforcement agency that can show federal bean-counters and members of Congress that it bolsters the government’s financial bottom line stands a better chance of escaping the budget ax or even getting an increase.

The FCPA is a particularly ripe area for financial recoveries, in part the law wasn’t vigorously enforced before 2004. Companies haven’t yet figured out how hard they can push back against prosecutors.

Almost all FCPA cases settle before going to trial. That means the government’s increasingly expansive theories of FCPA enforcement — such as its broad definition of who constitutes a “foreign official” banned from accepting payments to secure business — haven’t been tested in court.

The $1 billion secured by the Fraud Section’s FCPA unit was the largest amount secured in any of the Criminal Division’s enforcement areas. The rest of the $2 billion came from financial, securities and health care fraud-related recoveries, as well as judgments in child exploitation, narcotics, computer crime and organized crime cases, the statement said.

The $2 billion in secured funds includes over $1 billion in fines and penalties, $788 million in forfeiture and $116 million in restitution, according to the news release. The fines and penalties are sent to the U.S. Treasury Department, while forfeiture funds are deposited in the DOJ Asset Forfeiture Fund or the Department of Treasury Forfeiture Fund and are used to restore money to crime victims or for other law enforcement purposes.

A recent analysis by Just Anti-Corruption underscored another metric for the dramatic mushrooming of FCPA penalties. In 2010, assessed penalties against companies settling bribery cases were, on average, more than double the government’s estimate of how much a company gained from illicit conduct.

The companies paid an average of $2.14 in penalties per dollar gained from bribery, up from $0.11 per dollar gained in 2007, the analysis showed.

Also, FCPA cases accounted for nearly half of all the deferred and non-prosecution agreements negotiated by the Justice Department last year, an analysis by the Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP law firm showed.