Bribery & Corruption - Adequate Procedures

In April 2010 the UK Parliament passed the Bribery Act. This will require all organisations working from the UK to have ‘adequate procedures’ in place to prevent corruption in their operations worldwide. Combined with the US’s FCPA legislation and similar anti-bribery laws in other leading countries, this means that companies are now under intense pressure to ensure that robust anti-corruption policies and systems are implemented.

GoodCorporation’s Framework on Bribery and Corruption is designed in the same way as its Standard for corporate responsibility. It has a list of 25 good management practices which companies should follow to protect themselves against the risk of malpractice initiated from inside or outside the organisation. It has been developed using GoodCorporation’s extensive experience of testing anti-corruption practices in companies based in the most challenging environments. No organisation can guarantee that all its employees and commercial partners have impeccable ethics. It can, however, implement management practices that make life hard for those who want to use their position for their own gain. The GoodCorporation Bribery and Corruption assessment will give an independent view on how robust processes really are.

The framework contains a list of practices that apply to any business or organisation. For companies that already have their own anti-corruption policy, or share an industry-wide one, the framework can be customised to suit particular requirements. The assessment follows the same process as our Corporate Responsibility Standard. Assessors review the policies, the processes for deploying them, and the data which demonstrates their effectiveness. Key stakeholders are interviewed to test that processes really are working in practice. Detailed reports are given to senior management on areas of strength and weakness and the improvements that can be made are identified.