The cover article of this month's Forbes magazine ("How Federal Crackdown on Bribery Hurts Business And Enriches Insiders") is creating waves in the FCPA world. The article makes some important points about the growth of FCPA enforcement, the high costs to corporations that must investigate and defend these cases, and the pros and cons of self-reporting to the DOJ in the hopes of receiving a lighter penalty.

However, the article by Nathan Vardi veers way off track in its more inflammatory argument: that the DOJ's stepped-up enforcement efforts are misguided, cause U.S. firms to losing business to competitors, and essentially accomplish just one thing:

creating a lucrative industry--FCPA defense work--in which they will someday be prime candidates for the cushy assignments.

A former prosecutor, to be sure, does not work on the defense of the same case he had as a government lawyer. But there is nothing to stop prosecutors from ginning up cases that will feed the lawyers who used to have their jobs or from looking forward to a payday in the private sector that will be made possible by their busy successors at Justice.

"Ginning up cases?" Where is the support for the argument that the cases being brought are not legitimate? The article points at Mark Mendelsohn, who served as a DOJ prosecutor for 13 years, and as the head of the FCPA unit since 2005. Vardi flags Mendelsohn's move to private practice last month (to law firm Paul Weiss) as further proof of his revolving door theory, but that makes little sense. Mendelsohn has been secretly drumming up FCPA enforcement cases to create a market for himself and his colleagues for six years? Please. As Mary Jacoby said recently in a commentary on the Forbes article, alleging that prosecutors "pursued aggressive law enforcement over long DOJ careers simply to feather their nests strikes me as a pretty low blow."

Ironically, other critics of the DOJ's FCPA enforcement have argued that the DOJ's "revolving door" has the exact opposite effect: prosecutors go easy on corporate defendants so that they don't offend anyone and risk their chance of a "soft landing" in private practice. So which is it?