IANAL, but I believe that under US law you are allowed to pay bribes to get someone to do their job in places where that is customary. You just aren't allowed to pay bribes to get someone to do something that they aren't supposed to do.
> under US law you are allowed to pay bribes to get someone to do their job in places where that is customary
Not quite.
You may be thinking of the “grease payment” exception [1] to the FCPA [2]. Customariness isn’t as important as whether the payment is to speed up a decided outcome or effect the outcome.
