The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) of 1977 prohibits U.S. listed firms from bribing foreign government officials for business purposes. We examine whether less transparent firms are more likely to violate the FCPA by testing whether their voluntary disclosure of country-level information explains the violation. We hand-collect voluntarily disclosed geographic information for firms cited for FCPA violations and for a matched control group of nonviolators. We test whether less transparent disclosure of operations (sales and long-lived assets) abroad explains whether firms violate the FCPA. We find supporting evidence. Next, we compare the transparency of FCPA violators that self-reported their violations with the transparency of our control group, as well as the transparency of non-self-reporters to the transparency of our control group. Regulators sanction self-reporters with lower penalties than non-self-reporters. We find that the former are as transparent as the nonviolators. Yet, non-self-reporters are less transparent, suggesting that they drive our results. Overall, our results suggest that more transparent reporting of foreign operations is associated with FCPA compliance. Our study contributes to understanding whether voluntary disclosure signals FCPA compliance, following disclosure theory and instrumental stakeholder theory.

1977年的《反海外腐败法》（FCPA）禁止美国上市公司出于商业目的贿赂外国政府官员。我们通过测试自愿披露国家/地区信息来解释这种违反行为，从而检查透明度较低的公司是否更有可能违反FCPA。对于因违反FCPA而被引用的公司以及相匹配的非违规者对照组，我们会手工收集自愿披露的地理信息。我们测试了海外业务（销售和长期资产）公开程度较低的透明度是否可以解释企业是否违反了FCPA。我们找到支持的证据。接下来，我们将自我报告违规行为的FCPA违规者的透明度与对照组的透明度进行比较，并将非自我报告者的透明度与对照组的透明度进行比较。监管机构对自我报告者的处罚要低于非自我报告者。我们发现前者与非违规者一样透明。但是，非自我报告者的透明度较低，表明他们推动了我们的结果。总体而言，我们的结果表明，国外业务报告的更透明与FCPA的遵守情况有关。我们的研究有助于遵循披露理论和工具性利益相关者理论，了解自愿披露是否表明遵守FCPA。