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Comment by altotrees | Hacker News Reader

So, potentially stupid question but here goes...with a new CEO coming in, what impact will this have on the company in the short-term? Did they foresee this probe coming or is this something that they will have to scramble to react to?

I mean it sounds like they may have expected this investigation with the handling of obtaining medical records, but wow.

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> Did they foresee this probe coming or is this something that they will have to scramble to react to?

It depends entirely on whether or not this was a top-down decision. The most efficiently run companies consider the likely returns on illegal activity and the potential ramifications of getting caught. If the math works out in favor of the illegal behavior, they'll go ahead and do that. Depending on the nature of the illegal behavior, they may save for a fund that would pay for costs of being caught.

The math isn't just about money in vs money out, either. The best consider the effect on the brand, cost of a PR campaign, potential legal changes, lobbying fees(to make currently illegal behavior legal), the likelihood of getting caught in the first place, and a lot of other stuff that I'm probably not thinking about.

It's not right, but when shareholders demand exponential growth, the owners and managers will do what is necessary to make that happen.

Come on -- the case in question is in India. Bribes are a way of life there. You literally cannot do business there without paying bribes. Nobody had to tell anyone to pay the bribe; if they're anything like every other company I've worked with over there, they have an official slush fund for this stuff. You just do it.

Now, it's pretty abhorrent that they doxed a rape victim; and that behavior is reason enough to investigate IMO. But the bribery part? Literally everyone does it because you have to if you want anything to get done there as a foreigner / foreign company.

That's correct - and it definitely affects the math involved. It would be way more expensive in many ways to be involved in bribery in a larger country like Canada, to the point that the illegal activity likely wouldn't be worth the potential cost. But in India, the cost of such illegal activity is very different, thus is more likely to be worth it.

I don't know about the US, but in Australia, our foreign bribery laws explicitly exempt "facilitation payments", i.e. bribes that are customarily paid to grease the wheels of bureaucracy and get routine government actions done.

However, that certainly wouldn't cover anything like this alleged rape doxxing, and it also wouldn't cover bribes intended to secure new business, which are presumably extremely common in countries like India.

The FCPA similarly differentiates. However the practical problem is that running a defense based on whether a certain activity was a facilitation payment (to secure the performance of a "routine government action") means you essentially have to admit that the potentially unlawful activity actually took place, and you move onto generally very treacherous ground. For that reason most companies don't go that route.

In any case as others have noted it's not relevant here because getting someone's medical records isn't a service that you're entitled to.

However, that certainly wouldn't cover anything like this alleged rape doxxing

The article didn't say anything about the rape case. Getting her info could have cost less than $100, but staying in business in certain countries could run in tens of millions.

> The article didn't say anything about the rape case.

From TFA: "Reuters in June reported that Uber had hired a law firm to investigate how it obtained the medical records of an Indian woman who was raped by an Uber driver in 2014."

> Getting her info could have cost less than $100, but staying in business in certain countries could run in tens of millions.

I'm honestly not sure what point you're trying to make here. Regardless of the calculus, it was morally bankrupt and probably illegal.

I believe the link changed, it was a WSJ article first with no mention of the rape case. I doubted that they'd be investigated for small sums of payments.

Fair enough. Now that I reread the whole article, the mentioning of the incident does actually seem a bit out of place in this as well; it doesn't explicitly connect it to the preceding paragraph or the rest of the paragraph.

Except in this case (if this is what happened??) they're paying a bribe to do something you shouldn't be able to do anyway. This isn't paying a bribe to conduct standard business, they're paying a bribe to access someone's medical records. I don't see how that is anymore acceptable if you're doing it in India than in any Western country.

I don't see why this is a good argument. If you can't do business without breaking the law, don't do business. Participating in bribery because everyone else does it is immoral, perpetuates bad behavior, and risks infecting your company with people who act illegally.

The argument you're leveling is equivalent to: never start a business in any country and never do business in any country. It requires a perfect bureaucracy in terms of government and requires perfect knowledge by all participants and at all times (ie it will never exist).

Even well run nations generally have very large numbers of regulations on the books, frequently outdated or poorly thought-through, requiring you to regularly break the law just to function on a day to day basis typically without knowing that you're doing so.

You might as well argue we should just all commit suicide by starvation or general mass economic deprivation. That's the only thing pursuing your premise to its logical conclusion could lead to. Alternatively, figure out a perfect system of government that never has flaws or malevolent actors and figure out how to get people to behave as strictly programmed robots.

You're right that there are more laws than any one person knows. There are also complex interactions between laws and interpretations of laws such that even diligent legal scholars acting in good faith would struggle to do complex actions without arguably violating some law. I definitely believe the law should be simplified and clarified to improve comprehension.

However, there is a world of difference between unwittingly violating subsection III A.15 of some act you've never heard of, and intentionally bribing a government official. In the latter case you are intentionally suborning the function of government for your own benefit, and corrupting the whole system thereby.

Bribery is inefficient. Systems that operate according to law are safer, cleaner, and more productive. The only argument in favor of bribery is that in the short term, the specific criminals involved, get what they want. That's not a great argument when compared to the harmony and productivity of a society.

Bribery is illegal for a reason. If you can't do business without committing a crime, then you shouldn't do business. If India's culture has rampant bribery, then firms from less bribery-inclined areas should not do business there. Either other countries will come around to India's policy of bribing people, or India, desirous of commerce with the outside world, will come around to the "Bribery is bad" school of thought. In either case, whole societies will be enriched and improved.

> Bribery is inefficient. Systems that operate according to law are safer, cleaner, and more productive

Not always. If bribery had been common in the US, Michael Brown would still be alive and the Ferguson scandal would not have happened.

A lot of other bad things would have occurred instead, but it's not 100% black and white.

I'm not sure what I understand what you mean. Could you explain how the illegality or rarity of bribery in the US led to the Ferguson scandal, or the death of Michael Brown?

As I understand it, one of the causes of the death of Michael Brown was the civil unrest due to law enforcement malpractice. The city needed money so they heavily enforced lots of minor traffic laws to increase the revenue from court fines and traffic tickets.

That sort of thing cannot happen in a corrupt city because people would bribe the cops directly instead of paying or disputing traffic tickets, and the city government wouldn't see any of that money. Such a city wouldn't even try something like that.

But surely the locals were upset that they were losing money, not that the money they lost went to city hall. In other words, I doubt they'd be relieved that their money was going to corrupt policeman rather than the city government.

If all the available money for fines was being extorted from drivers by corrupt cops, the city would have to get money another way, or cut services. This would likely upset the people of Ferguson even more.

Another way of looking at it is, what wealthy, safe, clean, productive societies regularly engage in bribery?

Cutting services is awful and harmful but it's not dangerous in the same way that using heavily armed police as emergency tax collectors is. It's bad but the depressingly stable self-perpetuating kind of bad, not the unstable riot-causing kind of bad.

My point is that, in a bribery society, the police would be collecting the tax anyway. The difference is that they would keep most or all of it for themselves personally. Thus, all of the anger would be there over losing money, plus anger at the injustice of having to bribe corrupt cops, plus diminished services.

I also think cutting services can be dangerous. For example, a service to feed the elderly, inspect water safety, maintain roads, deploy police to prevent or reduce crime, after school programs for disadvantaged teens who might otherwise get into or cause dangerous situations, etc.

> Come on -- the case in question is in India. Bribes are a way of life there

Regardless, it's illegal for U.S. (and U.K.) companies to pay bribes to officials in India: http://www.corporatecomplianceinsights.com/5-tips-for-compan....

While you are technically correct, I've had to personally pay bribes to get a laptop with a bunch of sensitive data thru customs. Importing electronics into India without the right paperwork is illegal, but only the manufacturer can apply for the paperwork.

The particular model of laptop was never sold in India (it was some cheap Dell thing - the data was the reason I shipped it). So I paid a nice $50 bribe to the customs official and got the laptop back no problem.

Was what I did technically illegal? Sure. But the bribe was the best outcome for everyone involved.

A culture of bribery undermines a society. It's the kind of moral decay that plays a huge part in holding back developing countries: http://www.thedailystar.net/op-ed/cost-corruption-111523.

I don't disagree; but try doing business there without paying bribes.

And it's probably double-illegal to pay bribes to officials to get them to do illegal things.

It's not like one of their drivers was facing a long wait at the DMV and...encouraged...a bureaucrat to care about their job for a few minutes.

> It's not like one of their drivers was facing a long wait at the DMV and...encouraged...a bureaucrat to care about their job for a few minutes.

That's actually potentially legal under US law if the payment is only intended to expedite the process of getting them to do their official duties and they follow the right steps (which includes making appropriate disclosures).

As others have mentioned, that exemption is narrow to the point of non-existence. It is very difficult to do business in India.

Is the bribery allegation possibly just a vector of attack to deal with the more wrong thing(s) done? Ie. doxing a rape victim.

You can't really use the but-everyone-does-it defence when it's a case that in no way could be considered a business requirement.

Maybe there actually are conscientious business leaders that hate being forced into corruption by some countries' customs–personally, that sounds just a bit too convenient at times, and I've some actually moral business leaders go through all sorts of trouble to avoid being compromised.

One story I remember was the 70 years+ founder of a company, with personal wealth in the 9 digits, refusing to pay some government goon at an airport in west Africa. He spent a day and a half in this guy's office, in 100degF+ heat, without ever being tempted to take the easy way.

The best run companies transform top-down decisions into bottom-up ones, helpfully protecting executives from consequences. How it works is through setting high expectations in a "get it done" culture, and then carefully cultivating strategic ignorance about illegal activity that's positive value.

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