Transparency International UK (TI) has now launched its new online tool, providing up-to-date and in-depth guidance for businesses in understanding and tackling bribery and corruption. This Global Anti-Bribery Guidance is now live at www.antibriberyguidance.org.
Drawing on expertise from over 120 leading compliance and legal practitioners, the guidance presents international good practice informed by the UK Bribery Act, US Foreign and Corrupt Practices Act, other national legislation, as well as the ISO37001 standard. It recognises both the global nature of modern business, and an emerging standard of anti-bribery procedures that extends beyond any single national requirement.
This free-to-use, 18 module guidance is the culmination of eight years of work by TI’s experts working with businesses, government, investigators and regulators, reflecting the daily reality of corruption risk for businesses and the expectations of legislation and enforcement regimes.
In addition to core bribery risks, the guidance covers other areas of corruption risk that companies increasingly need to be aware of, such as political engagement, as well as organisational transparency and corporate reporting.
The new online portal updates TI’s guidance published after the 2010 UK Bribery Act, which is already a standard reference point for legal and compliance specialists across the world, having been downloaded over 100,000 times. Our original guidance, which came out before the UK Bribery Act was in force, and has influenced the official guidance from the UK MoJ, the US DoJ and the OECD. We would like to see our new Global Guidance be similarly influential.
Powerful new anti-bribery and corruption legislation, such as Sapin II in France and the Brazilian Clean Company Act, are helping to create a new, demanding international baseline in anti-bribery compliance. Companies which adopt a single, global, standard consistent across all their operations, will be best placed to operate legally and ethically around the world. The guidance is designed to help companies create such a standard for themselves.
The guidance will help in-house lawyers be alert to, and have a greater understanding of the following issues:
- the legal and reputational risks relating to bribery and corruption that the company may be facing;
- what measures can be put in place to mitigate those risks; and
- what steps can be taken should an incident occur.
The tool can be also used to allow any company to benchmark their own approach to tackling bribery against TI’s recommendations. Furthermore, because the tool provides guidance in several layers of detail – from high level summaries to detailed advice – it can be used by businesses at all stages of the development or improvement of their anti-bribery programme. The portal is a dynamic resource, with new features and content, so the site will always have TI’s latest thinking on it. Companies can also direct their third parties to the guidance in order to help raise standards among those they do business with.
This guidance is published by Transparency International UK, the UK chapter of the global Transparency International movement, with the support of FTI Consulting and DLA Piper. The guidance was authored by Peter Wilkinson, a corporate anti-bribery adviser who has extensive experience in countering private sector corruption, and has worked extensively with Transparency International, GRI, UNGC and the OECD.
