Scoular to Pay Over $10 Million to Resolve Border Bribery Scheme With Mexico

Ten million dollars to make a bribery case go away, and the trains kept rolling the whole time. That's the part worth sitting with. This wasn't a one-time slip by some junior logistics guy trying to unstick a shipment at the border. Scoular ran this as a system, greasing Mexican officials for years so its grain cars could cross without the usual friction. That's not a compliance failure. That's a business model with a corruption line item baked into the budget.

We keep hearing that the border is this impenetrable wall of bureaucracy, chaos, cartels, you name it. And yet an agricultural company out of Omaha figured out exactly how to move freight through it on schedule, for years, by paying the right people. Funny how permeable the border gets when there's money on both sides of it. It says something about how Mexican customs and rail officials actually operate day to day, and it's not flattering to anyone who insists the system just needs more paperwork and more funding to work properly.

The Justice Department deserves credit for actually running this down and making Scoular write the check. But a fine, even a big one, is the cost of doing business for a company that size. Nobody at Scoular is going to jail over this. The executives who signed off on years of bribery payments get to keep their jobs while the company absorbs a number that barely dents a supply chain firm's balance sheet. That's the pattern with corporate foreign bribery cases generally, and it's why they keep happening.

If we're serious about border integrity, and we should be, this ought to be a wake-up call about who's actually corrupting the system from the American side. It's not just migrants and cartels people love to talk about on cable news. It's boardrooms in Nebraska deciding bribery is cheaper than compliance. That deserves the same outrage as anything else at that border, if not more.