For a law that's been on the books since 1977, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) remains the source of a great deal of confusion and debate. According to a recent Washington Post article, many companies are still having trouble interpreting the law, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is lobbying to have it clarified and its restrictions eased.

"The rules of the road are not clear" to some in the business world, the story says. "One guy's bribe ... is another guy's cost of doing business."

And the costs the Post cites are hefty indeed. Among the alleged bribes the story points to are a $297,500 Ferrari Spyder, a $1.8 million yacht, a first-class trip to Hawaii, laptops and college tuition for officials' progeny.

According to the Justice Department website, the FCPA "was enacted for the purpose of making it unlawful for certain classes of persons and entities to make payments to foreign government officials to assist in obtaining or retaining business."

In recent years, the number of FCPA investigations has skyrocketed. In 2011 alone, financial penalties paid to the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission amounted to $1.8 billion — nearly triple the amount from the previous year.

Congress sees the issue as degenerative, threatening to erode the standards of upstanding corporate citizens as they try to compete on an unlevel playing field. "Bribery ‘short-circuits the marketplace by directing business to those companies too inefficient to compete in terms of price, quality or service, or too lazy to engage in honest salesmanship, or too intent upon unloading marginal products,'" according to a House report on the FCPA cited by the Post. "The practice ‘puts pressure on ethical enterprises to lower their standards or risk losing business.'"

The Chamber, meanwhile, complains that prosecutors have taken too broad a view in defining the term "foreign official," having it also encompass employees of state-owned companies.

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, now a lobbyist for the Chamber, has argued that it "is often difficult for companies to determine when they are dealing with ‘foreign officials,' particularly in markets in which many companies are at least partially state-owned." But he told the Post in an interview: "Nobody is talking about having doubts about who they can bribe. People are talking about who they can entertain, who they can't entertain, at what level."

At the same time, the new U.K. Bribery Act, which entered into force July 1, may add another layer of complexity.  The Act affects all foreign companies that conduct a portion of their business in the U.K. or employ U.K. citizens — in effect, most large U.S. companies — and it sets more stringent standards and sanctions than does the FCPA, also including bribery between commercial parties in any market.

Read the Post's full story here.

To learn more about FCPA and other international compliance standards, sign up for the Council's Sept. 8 webinar, FCPA and Global Compliance for International Public Affairs Executives.