Americans like to elevate whistle-blowers to near folk-hero status, from Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, to Sherron Watkins, who exposed the Enron Corp. financial scandal that in 2002 moved Congress to pass the fraud-busting Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
But other countries – notably Germany and France - don't embrace America's reverence of whistle-blowers and as a result, multinational corporations face a potential compliance nightmare. And as this fascinating piece in the American Bar Association Journal discusses, U.S. companies therefore face the unappealing prospect of breaking U.S. law to comply with foreign laws, or vice versa.
