There’s some good news on the corporate corruption front: public awareness of it is growing; the bad news, however: corruption’s pervasiveness is also growing.
Fighting its continued expansion will require more than awareness. To that end, the Canadian chapter of the United Nations Global Compact recently released Designing an Anti-Corruption Program: A Guide for Canadian Businesses.
The ebook, said Global Compact Network Canada president Helle Bank Jorgensen, is designed to help companies “mitigate reputational risks and protect the interests of stakeholders.” Along the way, it’s aimed at providing corporate Canada with instruction on developing internal anti-corruption programs to detect and prevent bribery.
Companies need all the ethical guidance help they can get. According to the 2016 anti-corruption survey from Dow Jones Risk and Compliance and MetricStream Research, global anti-corruption enforcement, driven by such initiatives as the U.S. foreign account tax compliance and U.K. bribery acts, is reaching “unprecedented levels.”
Sixty-five per cent of respondents in the survey of 330 companies in the North America, Western Europe and Asia Pacific regions reported delaying or stopping work with a business partner due to concerns over anti-corruption regulation violations, but only 27% said they monitor business partners at least quarterly. The same percentage also said that banning all facilitation payments (bribes) was not realistic. Some countries have more work to do than others on this file. Iran, China, Russia, Iraq and Ukraine were listed as areas where corruption concerns were most likely to derail business initiatives.
Encouraging findings in the report included a drop in the percentage of companies reporting lost business due to an unethical or corrupt competitor (26% compared with 33% in 2014).
But companies alone can’t win this fight. The more value shareholders and the public assign to business ethics, the more value they’ll add to corporate bottom lines and the more battles will be won in what needs to be a relentless international war on greed and corruption.
