Anti-Bribery for Sales · Module 2 of 2

Tender

A $2.8M bid. Five days from submission, your bid manager wants to send Super Bowl tickets to the prospect's procurement lead.

Portrait of Mike Reilly, Senior Account Director at Meridian Industrial
Your Role

Mike Reilly

Senior Account Director, Meridian Industrial

Module 1 was Holbrook. You were on the receiving end. Now you're running point on a new bid. $2.8M of pressure-testing equipment for Veridia Solutions\' Gulf of Mexico program. Submission Friday next week. You have not won this account before. Today, your own bid team wants to send hospitality the other way.

The bid. Three suppliers shortlisted by Veridia: Meridian, Granite Industrial Holdings, and Nordic Precision Inc. Submission deadline next Friday. Award decision the Monday after.

Meridian's giving-side rule. Any hospitality offered to a prospect during a live tender must be pre-cleared by Karen. The threshold is the same $250 you saw in Module 1, applied in the giving direction.

The cast. Vince Maloney runs your bid. Karen Mendoza is still compliance. Erin Davies is still CFO. Pam Quintana is Procurement Director at Veridia and the person scoring your bid. Tyler Banks is the BD analyst Vince assigned to the bid, eight months in, attended your onboarding.

Before You Start

How This Works

A branching scenario. The choices you make shape whether the bid lands cleanly, whether it lands at all, and where you sit on the right side of the Travel Act.

+3 The move that protects the bid AND keeps Meridian off the regulator's file.
+1 Defensible but partial. You'll see what got missed.
−2 Looks like sales hustle. Reads as inducement to a prosecutor.

Tip: Highlighted text like Travel Act is clickable. Tap to read the underlying law in full.

Portrait of Vince Maloney, Bid Manager
Monday, 5:55 PM · bid room, Meridian HQ
Narrator

Bid wash-up. Vince is in front of the whiteboard. Pricing is locked. The technical narrative is still the only piece anyone is awake for.

Vince Maloney

Mike, before you go. One thought. Pam Quintana at Veridia. We've never won an account with her, never lost one either. The only thing she's said to me on a call is "I look forward to seeing the proposal."

Vince Maloney

Granite Industrial took her to the Super Bowl in February. I know because their account director told me at a conference, smug as anything. Two seats, corporate suite. Pam was there. I\'ve got two tickets going for the NFL playoffs next Saturday. Corporate suite, divisional round. They\'re sitting in my drawer.

Mike Reilly

Submission is Friday week. The award is the Monday after that.

Vince Maloney

I know. That\'s why I want to send them now. Not after the bid. Now. Get our face in front of her before the proposal lands. Granite Industrial did it, they\'re going to do it again. If we don\'t match, our paper has to do all the lifting and Pam doesn\'t know us.

Two tickets, NFL playoffs divisional round, corporate suite~$480
Hospitality (food, drinks)~$140
Estimated total per recipient$620
Vince Maloney

I\'ll log it the moment we send. Let me get this moving tonight.

Portrait of Mike Reilly
⚖ Decision Point 1 of 3

Vince is twenty-two years in. He has won deals you have not. The Granite Industrial story is plausible, you know it happens. The tickets cost $620 a head. Submission is ten days away. You are the senior on the bid, which means whatever Vince sends out goes out under your name as well as his. Vince is waiting for you to say yes. He has not asked Karen.

What do you say back to Vince?

Your choice

Stop the tickets. Propose a working lunch instead, through Karen.

Tell Vince the tickets don\'t go. $620 a head, ten days from submission, to the buyer scoring the bid, hits both Travel Act indicators (value plus timing) before anyone has read a word of the proposal. Counter-propose a working lunch in Pam\'s calendar, sub-$100 a head, agenda shared in advance, pre-cleared by Karen this week. The face-time happens, the inducement reading doesn\'t.

Your choice

Tell Vince to hold. Take it to Karen first thing tomorrow.

Don\'t say no, don\'t say yes. Don\'t send anything tonight. Walk into Karen\'s office Tuesday morning with the offer on a sheet of paper and ask her to pre-clear or refuse. Defensible. But it leaves Vince with the expectation it\'s still on, and you\'ve punted the call rather than made it.

Your choice

Send the tickets tonight. Log them in the register after the bid lands.

Vince knows this market. Granite Industrial is going to send tickets. The law doesn\'t prohibit reasonable hospitality. Get them out the door tonight, log them in the register once the proposal is in, brief Karen after the award. The only question is whether you match the competition or not.

Portrait of Vince Maloney
Monday, 6:08 PM · bid room +3
Mike Reilly

Vince, the tickets don\'t go. Not this side of the award. $620 a head into Pam\'s calendar ten days from submission is the textbook Travel Act problem. I\'m not running it past Karen to get a yes. I\'m telling you now because the answer is no.

Vince Maloney

Granite Industrial will. We lose this on a coin flip and the coin flip is whose face she remembers.

Mike Reilly

Then we get her face-time differently. Working lunch this week, sub-$100 a head, agenda shared in advance, three of our engineers walking her through the test rig. I\'ll email Karen tonight, she\'ll have it cleared by tomorrow lunchtime.

Vince Maloney

A working lunch.

Mike Reilly

Pam\'s a procurement director on a $2.8M decision. She wants the technical case, not a corporate suite. Granite Industrial sending tickets isn\'t a strategy. It\'s a habit.

Narrator

Vince doesn\'t agree. But he doesn\'t push. The tickets stay in the drawer. You email Karen at 7:14 PM with the lunch outline. Pre-clear lands at 11:02 the next morning.

Why This Held Up

The Travel Act test asks whether the advantage was given intending to induce improper performance of a commercial duty. Stopping the tickets before they leave the office removes the offer entirely. The DOJ hospitality guidance names value and timing as the two flags. Counter-proposing a sub-$100 working lunch with an agenda shared in advance reframes the activity as legitimate technical engagement. Risk-based program design is satisfied because the response is proportionate to the bid value ($2.8M) and the timing (ten days from submission). And the pre-clear lands in writing before the spend, which is what the procedure exists to do.

Portrait of Karen Mendoza
Tuesday, 8:35 AM · Karen\'s office +1
Mike Reilly

Vince wants to send these to Pam Quintana at Veridia. $620 a head. Submission is Friday week. I told him to hold. Nothing\'s gone out.

Karen Mendoza

Refused. Easy call. Twice the personal threshold, into the buyer\'s calendar, ten days from a $2.8M award. There\'s no version of this that pre-clears.

Mike Reilly

I figured. I wanted it on paper from you, not from me.

Karen Mendoza

Fine. But Mike, you knew the answer last night. You could have told Vince last night. He\'s spent fifteen hours assuming this might still go.

The Gap That Cost You The Top Mark

Holding the offer overnight and getting Karen to write the refusal is defensible. The tickets didn\'t go, the pre-clear is on the file. But under Training and communications, the salesperson closest to the deal is the one the program expects to recognize the Travel Act indicators on the spot. By punting to Karen, you signaled to Vince that the call was a procedural question rather than an obvious no, which makes the next ask harder to refuse, not easier. The DOJ hospitality guidance point is the same: value plus timing equals inducement risk, regardless of whether either side intended it.

Portrait of Vince Maloney
Monday, 7:42 PM −2
Mike Reilly

Send them. Courier, gift card, "looking forward to the proposal next week, hope you can use these." Log it tomorrow morning, brief Karen after the bid lands.

Vince Maloney

Right call. I\'ll have them with her by lunchtime tomorrow.

Narrator

The tickets go out by courier Tuesday morning. The note on the gift card mentions the proposal twice. Pam Quintana\'s assistant opens the package at 11:08, takes a photograph of the gift card, and forwards the photograph to her boss along with a one-line email: "Submission Friday week. Tickets received today. Logging on the buyer-side hospitality register and flagging to internal audit. Recommend declining."

The "Everyone Does It" Trap, Mirrored

The Travel Act and state commercial bribery laws make it an offense to give a benefit intending to induce improper performance. The advantage doesn\'t need to be cash and the intent doesn\'t need to be stated. The DOJ hospitality guidance names value and timing as the two strongest indicators, and $620 ten days before a $2.8M award hits both. Logging the gift after it\'s been sent does the opposite of what a register is for: it documents the offense rather than preventing it. Meridian\'s DOJ ECCP posture is now harder to defend, because the senior salesperson approved hospitality the policy specifically exists to stop.

Wednesday, 2:18 PM · bid room
Narrator

Tyler Banks catches you by the bid-room coffee machine. Eight months at Meridian. He sat through the same anti-bribery onboarding you sat through twelve years ago.

Tyler Banks

Mike, can I check something. Vince asked me yesterday to quietly find out Pam Quintana\'s home address. He didn\'t say why. I haven\'t done it. I\'m assuming the playoff thing is still alive in his head, even after Monday.

Tyler Banks

Also. I asked Karen for a quick read on what we can and can\'t do, and she said the only person on this bid who\'s pre-cleared anything is you. Vince hasn\'t filed a single hospitality entry in eighteen months. I don\'t know if that\'s normal.

Narrator

It\'s not normal. It means whatever Vince sent on previous bids, he sent without ledger trail. Before you take that anywhere, you owe yourself one careful look at this bid file.

Wednesday, 2:40 PM · your laptop

The Veridia bid file, on one page.

You open the bid tracker and the giving-side hospitality register side by side.

DetailValue
ProspectVeridia Solutions · US industrial water and energy infrastructure
Bid value$2.8M · pressure-testing equipment, Gulf of Mexico program
Buyer scoring the bidPam Quintana, Procurement Director, Veridia Solutions
Submission deadlineFriday next week · 10 calendar days
Award decisionMonday after submission
Hospitality offered to date by Meridian (this bid)None recorded
Hospitality offered by Vince Maloney, last 18 months (any client)Zero entries on the giving-side register
Vince\'s proposed offer (Monday)2 tickets · ~$620 to Pam Quintana
Today\'s request to TylerPam Quintana\'s home address, no stated reason
Pre-clear threshold (live tender)$250

Either Vince is genuinely catching the playoff idea for the first time, in which case the eighteen-month register gap is hygiene. Or Vince sends gifts on bids and doesn\'t log them, in which case the playoff idea is a pattern, and the home-address request changes what kind of pattern.

Karen has just emailed: "Mike, free at 4? Tyler flagged something. Want to walk through what I have on Vince\'s giving history before you decide what to do."

Activity · Score Vince\'s Gift Against The Indicators

Three DOJ-style indicators sit across the top. Five facts about Vince\'s offer sit down the side. Click the indicator column under which the offer fails most clearly. One column is the load-bearing one a prosecutor would lead with.

Fact about the offer Timing & proximity to decision Value Recipient role
10 calendar days from submission High — —
Award decision the Monday after High — —
~$620 per recipient (2.5x policy threshold) — Mid —
Recipient is the buyer scoring the bid — — High
No prior relationship between Vince and Pam Mid — Mid
Portrait of Erin Davies, CFO
⚖ Decision Point 2 of 3

Erin walks into the bid room before the 4pm slot with Karen. "Mike, Vince just told me you killed the playoff thing. Veridia is a $2.8M bid we don\'t currently win. We have one shot to stand out, and you\'ve ruled out the move our competitor will definitely make. I\'m not asking you to send the tickets. I\'m asking what we do instead, and whether \'a working lunch with engineers\' is what closes a procurement director who\'s never met us."

How do you respond?

Your choice

Hold the line on hospitality. Compete on the bid.

The working lunch is the bridge. The proposal is the close. Lead with a tighter technical narrative and a half-day site visit at the test rig the week after submission, on the books, agenda shared. If Granite Industrial wins because they sent playoff tickets, that tells us something about Pam\'s procurement. Get Karen to write a short note for the file confirming the playoff idea was raised, considered, and refused, so the answer is on the record next time it comes up.

Your choice

Restage as a sponsored industry roundtable.

Sponsor a small Gulf of Mexico pressure-testing roundtable next month. Ten attendees, all three shortlisted suppliers\' clients invited, agenda set jointly with an industry body. Pam gets a seat and so do four of her peers. Pre-clear with Karen, sub-$200 a head, no individual gift to Pam. Defensible. The line between "industry event" and "hospitality marketing aimed at the buyer" thins out fast under scrutiny.

Your choice

Find a smaller gesture that stays under the threshold.

Erin has a point. Drop the playoff seats. Send Pam a $200 single ticket to a technical conference next week, a copy of an industry book, a hand-written note from Vince. Under the $250 threshold. Log it on the way out. Looks proportionate on the register. Reads to Pam exactly the way the $620 ticket reads, just smaller.

Portrait of Erin Davies, CFO
Wednesday, 4:05 PM · Erin\'s office +3
Mike Reilly

No tickets, no roundtable, no gift card. The proposal closes the bid. I\'ll lead a tighter technical narrative and offer Pam a half-day site visit at the test rig the week after submission, on the books. Karen writes the file note today: playoff idea raised, considered, refused, with reasons.

Erin Davies

If we lose this and Granite Industrial took her to the playoffs, you understand what I\'ll be hearing in the post-mortem.

Mike Reilly

If we lose Veridia because Pam scored a corporate suite higher than a $2.8M technical proposal, that\'s a procurement we never held in the first place. The cost of finding out is ten days. The cost of not finding out is on a register a federal prosecutor can subpoena.

Erin Davies

Karen, file the note. Mike, send me the technical narrative draft tonight.

Why This Held Up

Holding the line under commercial pressure is the load-bearing test of Training and communications: staff have to believe the procedures are real, and the only way they believe it is when senior people apply them in front of senior money. Karen\'s file note creates exactly the documented decision the DOJ ECCP rewards: a near-miss the company recognized, addressed, and recorded. The site visit is the legitimate, on-the-books form of buyer engagement that the DOJ hospitality guidance contemplates: tied to the technical case, agenda shared in advance, no asymmetric advantage to one bidder.

Portrait of Karen Mendoza
Thursday, 10:15 AM · Karen\'s office +1
Mike Reilly

Sponsored Gulf of Mexico pressure-testing roundtable, four weeks out. Ten attendees, all three shortlisted suppliers\' clients invited, agenda set with the AWWA. Sub-$200 a head. No individual gift to Pam, Pam sits next to four of her peers.

Karen Mendoza

I can pre-clear it. Two conditions. The agenda has to be technical and visible to all three shortlisted bidders before the bid closes. And the invite list cannot be tilted toward Veridia.

Mike Reilly

Done.

Karen Mendoza

One more thing. If the DOJ ever reads the invite list and sees that you sent it the week before bid submission, the question they\'ll ask is whether the event existed before the bid did. Make sure the AWWA\'s emails to you predate the bid window.

Where The Compromise Holds, And Where It Doesn\'t

Risk-based program design requires controls proportionate to the risk. A genuine industry event, with an external organizing body, an agenda visible to all bidders, and no asymmetric advantage to Pam, sits inside the lane the DOJ hospitality guidance contemplates. But the timing still matters. An event invented inside the bid window, paid for by Meridian, with the buyer at the center, still reads as marketing dressed as networking. The pre-clear note has to capture why Karen was satisfied this is the first kind, not the second.

Wednesday, 4:30 PM −1
Mike Reilly

Drop the playoff seats. Single $200 conference ticket, industry book, hand-written note from Vince. Under the threshold. Log it on the way out.

Erin Davies

Sensible. Proportionate.

Narrator

The package goes out Thursday. Pam\'s assistant logs the conference ticket and the book in Veridia\'s incoming-hospitality register the same morning. Pam doesn\'t decline, doesn\'t accept, doesn\'t acknowledge. The bid lands the following Friday. Whoever scores it has now seen Meridian\'s name on the buyer-side register the week before they read the proposal.

Below The Threshold Is Not Below The Test

Pre-approval thresholds are a procedural backstop, not the legal test. The Travel Act test asks whether the advantage was given intending to induce improper performance, and the DOJ hospitality guidance reads value alongside timing and recipient role. A $200 conference ticket aimed personally at the buyer, sent by the bidder during the bid window, hits the timing axis whether or not it clears the $250 hurdle. Risk-based program design expects judgment, not threshold-shopping.

Friday, 9:55 AM · bid room, two days before submission
Narrator

Tyler knocks before stepping in. He has a single sheet of paper with him.

Tyler Banks

Mike, before the bid goes Friday. I went back through Vince\'s expense reports for the Veridia pre-bid period. Two dinners with Pam\'s procurement analyst at restaurants Vince didn\'t pre-clear. Both under $250. Both inside the bid window. Neither on the giving-side register.

Tyler Banks

I\'m not raising this to get Vince in trouble. I\'m raising it because the proposal goes out Friday and I\'m putting my name on the cover page as the BD lead under your sign-off. I want to know we\'re not going to have a problem the day after the award.

Narrator

Tyler is doing the M1 Wayne-Kovacs move on you, the right way round. The bid is two days from going out. The procedural question is what happens before submission so the bid stands up to retrospective review.

Activity · Pre-submission ethics checklist

Six statements about the Veridia bid as it stands today. Check the ones you believe are true or defensible. Leave the rest blank. Wrong checks and wrong blanks both lose points.

Checked = you think the statement is true / defensible. Unchecked = you think it's false / overreach.

Portrait of Karen Mendoza, Compliance Manager
⚖ Decision Point 3 of 3

The bid goes out Friday. The Veridia near-miss is on the file. Vince\'s eighteen-month register gap is a separate question Erin wants on her desk Monday. Erin has asked for a recommendation that BD and Compliance both put their names on, so it lands as a joint paper, not a Compliance edict. What does the recommendation say about giving-side hospitality, specifically?

What do you put in place?

Your choice

A BD-side pre-clear flow, retrospective audit of Vince\'s prior bids, and quarterly board reporting on giving-side hospitality.

Mirror the receiving-side rules from Module 1: 90-second pre-clear form for any spend above $250 directed at a customer, 24-hour Karen SLA, automatic block during a live tender. Commission a quiet retrospective audit of Vince\'s prior bids over the last 24 months to scope DOJ ECCP exposure on contracts already signed. Quarterly aggregate reporting to the board so giving-side spend is visible. Joint training run by BD and Compliance once a year.

Your choice

Drop the giving-side threshold during tenders and send a company-wide reminder.

Lower the giving-side pre-approval threshold from $250 to $100 during active tenders, send the policy reminder to all BD staff, raise it at the next sales kick-off. Proportionate, not heavy-handed. No new system. No retrospective audit. The rules are clearer for the next bid.

Your choice

File the incident note. The policy already covers it.

The procedure exists. Karen has the file note. The playoff tickets never went. The bid went out clean. Drafting an incident note for next year\'s audit is enough. Anything more risks turning a clean win into a witch hunt of a senior bid manager.

Portrait of Erin Davies, CFO
Following Monday, 9:00 AM · Erin\'s office +3
Erin Davies

Walk me through it.

Mike Reilly

Three pieces. BD-side pre-clear: 90-second form, anything over $250 going out to a prospect, 24-hour Karen SLA, automatic block during a live tender. Retrospective audit on Vince\'s last 24 months of bids, scoped to the contracts that closed without giving-side register entries. Quarterly aggregate reporting to the board so giving-side spend is on the record alongside revenue.

Erin Davies

The audit is the part the board will fight. If it finds something, every bid manager who\'s ever closed an account will think they\'re next.

Mike Reilly

If the audit finds something, the DOJ will find it twice as fast and with twice the cost. Volunteering the look is the cheapest version of finding out. The DOJ ECCP doesn\'t ask whether we knew, it asks whether the program was well-designed and applied in practice. An audit is what that looks like in motion.

The Three Pillars On The Giving Side

Risk-based program design: a 90-second form sized to BD\'s actual workflow, with hard automatic blocks during tender windows. Third-party and self due diligence: a retrospective audit of prior BD activity is what due diligence looks like applied to the company\'s own salesforce, not just to suppliers. Monitoring and continuous improvement: quarterly board reporting makes the system self-correcting and visible to independent directors, which is what the DOJ expects when it asks how the program operates in practice.

Friday, 2:00 PM +1
Mike Reilly

Giving-side threshold drops to $100 during active tenders. Reminder out Monday. Karen and I cover it at the next sales kick-off.

Erin Davies

Sensible. Not heavy-handed.

Narrator

The email goes out Monday. Open rate is 68%. By Friday it\'s been forgotten. Six months later a different bid lead at Meridian sends two $90 dinners to the same procurement analyst on a different account. Each event is below threshold. The pattern is the one Tyler flagged about Vince, with a different name on the file.

Communication Is Not A System

Training and communications separates communication (telling people the policy exists) from training and procedural enforcement (making sure they apply it under pressure). An email and a kick-off slide are the first. A pre-clear form with hard blocks and a retrospective audit are the second. Without the audit, prior bids stay in the file unexamined, and the DOJ ECCP posture on those contracts depends on procedures the company has now noticed weren\'t being followed.

Eighteen months later −2
Mike Reilly

I\'ve drafted the file note. Procedure is there, Karen has the audit trail. We don\'t need to make it heavier than the situation needed.

Erin Davies

Fair. These things happen.

Narrator

The note goes on the file. Vince\'s eighteen-month register gap is never audited. Meridian wins Veridia. Two years later, Granite Industrial loses a different competitive bid in the same sector and asks its lawyers to look at how Meridian wins what Meridian wins. The lawyers find five contracts where the BD lead was Vince and the giving-side register has no entries from the bid window. They take it to the DOJ. The DOJ\'s first request to Meridian is for the giving-side hospitality register covering the relevant tender periods.

Individual Note Versus Systemic Fix

The DOJ ECCP evaluates the company\'s program, not one individual\'s actions. The question is whether Meridian\'s controls were well-designed and applied across every bid the company ran. A single file note on a near-miss does no monitoring, no training, and no procedural improvement. Monitoring and continuous improvement requires the company to review and update procedures in light of experience. Meridian had the experience. Nothing was reviewed.

Six months on

Where the Veridia bid sits

The bid went out without playoff tickets. Whether Meridian won or lost the account matters less than what now sits on the file about how Meridian sells. What happens between Mike, Vince and the next prospect depends on what Mike put in place.

Your Result
/ 17

Your Decisions

What to take into the next bid

1. A line you can use in the bid room. "The tickets don\'t go this side of the award. $620 a head, ten days from submission, hits both Travel Act indicators. We bridge through a working lunch on the books, with an agenda Karen has signed." Names the value, the timing, the threshold, and the route.
2. Below the threshold is not below the test. The Travel Act question is intent and proximity, not whether you cleared a number. Pre-clear value plus timing plus recipient role together, not value alone.
3. A register gap on a senior bid manager is not hygiene. Eighteen months without a giving-side entry is a flag. Retrospective audit of prior bids is what the DOJ ECCP expects of a company that has just noticed the gap.
4. "Granite Industrial will" is not a defense. The bar is what your company can stand behind in front of a federal prosecutor, not what the competitor is willing to do.

Key Legal References

Travel Act

18 USC § 1952

FCPA Hospitality

By analogy

DOJ ECCP

Compliance program review

Whistleblower

Federal & state protections

Due Diligence

DOJ Hallmark

Monitoring

Continuous improvement

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Course Complete · Module 2 of 2

That\'s the course.

Two modules, two angles on the same problem. Module 1 was hospitality coming at you. Module 2 was hospitality going out. The Travel Act test is the same in both directions: value, timing, recipient role. Take the module quiz above to record your completion and download your certificate.