Question

Let’s say that you work for a large multi-national US firm as the VP of Purchasing. Your firm has been trying to get a large contract approved with a foreign government. This contract has the potential to provide $500 billion in sales revenue to your firm. If you were asked to provide a small tip to an officer of the foreign government to get this contract approved and signed would you? Think deeply. This is outside of the US. Read the section on the government market in chapter 6 for some guidance in framing your response.

Answer 1

US firms

• This had standard process for tips/gift to any business partners / customers / suppliers/ or any person associated with the business.
• US Firms generally follows high ethical standards in business process and they would like to be maintains the ethical environment in the organization, so that ethical culture is maintained and employees are abide by the ethical standards of business practice.

Being a VP-Purchasing of US based MNC,

• my role is to deal with suppliers/vendors of the organization for procurements of the raw materials needed for the plant operations.
• I am very less concerned with the order process generally, but can be supported based on organization needs.

scenario,

• I cannot offer the big tip to the officer of the foreign department, because it is against the ethical laws/standards and values of the US MNC.
• I can only offer the tip as per the US MNC allowed limit only. Generally the US MNC allows a customer gift upto $50 only. Thus
• I can offer to the foreign officer a tip of $50 as a token of appreciation on the behalf of the US MNC, provided it is approved limit as per the US MNC.

Offer tip

It is against the rule/procedure/law of US MNC, hence as a VP-Purchasing, I cannot offer such amount for order approval / signing off

Government procurement

Government contract are the procured through certain process and obtain within certain guidelines. In obtaining this kind of contract you have follow goverment rules and regulations this is called goverment procurement.

• In this context you must have to make sure that taxpayers money is spent wisely and right direction.
• The contract must be obtain fair way. So therefore above mentioned issue would not be solved with tipping a government officer and would not do such kind of act to obtain billion dollar contract