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Kroll has just published the results of a global bribery and corruption survey that it conducted in March, which ought to be of use to all money laundering reporting officers (MLROs).
For the 2021 Global Fraud and Risk Report, Kroll conducted an online survey of 1,336 senior decision-makers in the field of risk strategy, including general counsels, chief compliance officers, chief finance officers and CEOs at corporations. Some 60 percent of the organisations had annual revenues of US$250m or more, while 34 percent had annual revenues of more than $1bn. Respondents to the survey came from 17 countries and regions.
According to the report, Australia has comparatively low confidence in its ability to spot bribery and corruption. Fewer than two-thirds (58 percent) of organisations believe that their board members give bribery and corruption risk enough attention — well below the global average (72 percent) and one of the lowest in the world, on par with Canada (58 percent) and just below Germany (61 percent). Police action on the subject is rare in Australia.
Only two-thirds of Australian firms have also conducted enterprise-wide anti-bribery and corruption (ABC) assessments in the last five years; one in three are not seeing their risk exposure in full. Despite this, Australian firms buy a good deal of ABC software, with 82 percent using data analysis — just a few points below the global average (86 percent).
Out of its neighbors on the eastern Pacific rim, Australia shows the highest levels of concern regarding external risks posed by distributors, suppliers, agents and customers, etc. (54 percent), compared with Singapore (41 percent) and China (37 percent).
By contrast, respondents in the United Kingdom are among the most confident in their ABC risk strategies.
Most respondents in the UK (84 percent) agreed that bribery and corruption risk is given sufficient board level attention in their organisation, they are more confident in their internal recordkeeping (only 24 percent ranked it as their top internal threat, compared with 31 percent globally) and they are more likely to use ABC data analysis (91 percent set against 86 percent globally).
However, only 77 percent have conducted enterprise-wide ABC exercises in the last five years, as against 82 percent globally. Half rank "lack of visibility over third parties" as their biggest threat in this area.
When asked to identify regions where bribery and corruption is most likely to take place, the British were most likely to rank Sub-Saharan Africa at the top, followed by the Middle East and North Africa.
Howard Cooper, a managing director at Kroll, told VIXIO: "The survey happened in the middle of a global pandemic. It threw up some interesting results. Organisations might have been excused for putting ABC lower on the agenda; nothing could have been further from the truth. Most are giving it board-level attention."
He noted, however, that the incidence of bribery and corruption was not going down and remained at high levels. He had an explanation for this.
"The pandemic has widened the divide between business headquarters and local operations and third-party relationships across the globe. It has become more necessary than ever to be able to rely on data when it isn't possible to travel freely across the globe."
