We Don't Owe Anyone

Nine words carry the whole integrity position of a government-relations practice: we don't owe anyone, so no one owes us.

Read quickly, that sounds like a claim about character, and claims about character are worth very little in this sector because every firm makes them. Read structurally, it is a claim about the balance sheet — and it is falsifiable, because a firm that has entered the access economy carries entries on it that can be identified.

What the commitments are

The stated position is narrow and specific. Clients never pay for access. No campaign contributions are requested of them. No political party contributions are made. No facilitation payments and no kickbacks are made or accepted. The practice is party agnostic, and its only alliance is to the client and to achieving the client's objective.

Two of those deserve to be read as more than housekeeping.

The refusal of facilitation payments is a real commitment rather than a restatement of the law, because the law is not uniform. Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act there is an express exception: the prohibition does not apply to a facilitating or expediting payment to a foreign official the purpose of which is to expedite or secure the performance of a routine governmental action — defined to cover things like obtaining permits and licences, processing visas and work orders, providing police protection or mail delivery, scheduling inspections, and supplying phone service, power and water. Under the Bribery Act 2010 there is no equivalent carve-out. Section 6 turns on whether the official is neither permitted nor required by the written law applicable to them to be influenced, and it draws no distinction based on the size of a payment or the routineness of what it buys.

So a firm operating across both regimes faces a genuine choice rather than a formality, and the stricter of the two standards is a decision with operational consequences in jurisdictions where the expediting payment is simply how the counter works.

The second is that these sit in a published policy document rather than in a paragraph of marketing copy. That distinction matters less for what it proves than for what it exposes: a published policy is a thing an employee can point at, a counterparty can hold you to, and a regulator can read back to you.

The mechanism the slogan implies

The interesting analysis is not whether contributions are improper. It is why the resulting conflict cannot be cured by disclosure, which is the remedy the industry otherwise reaches for.

A contribution or a favour in the access economy does not purchase a decision. That would be cruder than the thing actually is, and usually illegal in a way that is easy to prosecute. What it purchases is a standing obligation — an unspecified, undated, reciprocal expectation held by a person who now has a reason to take your call and, more importantly, a reason to expect that you will take theirs.

Three properties of that obligation make it structurally different from an ordinary conflict.

It is unbounded in time. It does not terminate when the mandate that generated it terminates. It sits on the books indefinitely, and it is called in when the holder needs something, not when the firm finds it convenient.

It is transferable to a later client. This is the part that matters to a reader deciding whether to instruct. The favour was incurred while acting for someone else, possibly years earlier, and it is discharged in the course of acting for you — through a recommendation that quietly serves the obligation, a door not knocked on, an option not put in front of you because pursuing it would cost the firm a relationship it needs for a third matter.

And it is not disclosable, because it is not specifiable. A conflict can be declared when it has a name, a date and a counterparty. An accumulated position in the favour economy has none of those. Nobody can write down a list of the obligations they are carrying, in part because the holder of the other side decides what the obligation was, and decides it at the moment of calling it in.

That is why the discipline has to be entry-level rather than management-level. A conflict you cannot enumerate is a conflict you cannot manage; you can only decline to acquire it.

Why party agnosticism is a structural position

Being party agnostic is usually presented as neutrality, which undersells it. In a government-relations practice it is a constraint on the shape of the client book.

A practice aligned to an incumbent has a book that is valuable while that incumbent holds office and impaired the moment it does not, and everyone in the market can observe which condition applies. That creates a second-order problem for the client: the adviser now has an interest in a particular political outcome that has nothing to do with the client, and that interest will colour advice about timing, about tone, and about whether to engage at all. Advice to wait is sometimes correct and is also sometimes what a firm says when the people it knows are out.

Agnosticism removes that. It does not make the firm better connected — often the reverse, since the deepest connections accrue to those who chose a side early. What it does is ensure that the counsel a client receives about a political environment is not simultaneously a position the firm holds in that environment.

The cost, stated

Refusing this closes doors that competitors walk through, and it is dishonest to describe the position without saying so.

There are jurisdictions and sectors where the introduction that matters is made by someone who expects the relationship to run both ways, and where declining to enter that arrangement means the introduction is not made. There are mandates that are therefore undeliverable — not harder, undeliverable — and the correct response to those is to say so at the assessment stage rather than to accept the work and produce a diminished version of it.

It also raises the cost of ordinary things. Access that others obtain through accumulated obligation has to be obtained here through the slower routes: subject-matter credibility, published work, people who will take a call because of what was done for them analytically rather than transactionally, and a long record of not having asked for anything. That is a more expensive way to build a practice and a slower one.

What a client is buying, then, is narrower and more useful than access. It is advice that is not simultaneously discharging a debt incurred on somebody else's behalf. The recommendation you receive is the recommendation the analysis produced, and where the answer is that the thing cannot be obtained, that answer is available too — which it is not from a firm whose standing obligations are best served by the attempt continuing.