Our Collective Action team has launched a new online resource on local certification initiatives aimed at making third-party due diligence quicker, easier and more effective for companies large and small.

It contains the initial findings of an ongoing research project funded by the KBA-NotaSys Integrity Fund. The project explores how local certification for compliance programmes and professionals can help:

A guest blog by William Loo, Senior Legal Analyst and Deputy Head of the OECD Anti-Corruption Division and Elisabeth Danon, Legal Analyst at the OECD Anti-Corruption Division.

The OECD has released a new study on the ingredients for a successful High-Level Reporting Mechanism (HLRM).

Our Collective Action team has just published some of the latest thinking on anti-corruption Collective Action.

The online resource is aimed primarily at practitioners that are leading Collective Action initiatives to decrease corruption and increase business integrity in specific contexts. It is also eye-opening for anyone seeking to understand how Collective Action works in practice.

Representatives from nine leading Collective Action initiatives that offer local anti-corruption compliance certification gathered yesterday at a virtual roundtable. The event was part of a wider Basel Institute's project on certification initiatives funded by the KBA-NotaSys Integrity Fund.

The idea is to support local certification of anti-corruption compliance programmes in particular in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that supply larger customers.

Our Collective Action team is working with companies to find synergies in human rights and anti-corruption compliance.

The idea: Companies invest significant resources in anti-corruption and human rights compliance programmes, often developing them separately. We believe there are synergies between these areas that will contribute to the effectiveness and cost efficiencies of both programmes.

At a high-level B20 panel on “Enhancing Integrity for Responsible and Inclusive Growth” on 24 August, Gemma Aiolfi, the Basel Institute’s Head of Compliance, Corporate Governance and Collective Action, discussed how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have been forced to focus on survival in recent months.

Where corruption is already rampant, a crisis makes it worse. There are flash floods of relief money landing in contexts where power is imbalanced, governance is weak and criminals already know how to game the system. But we can fight back by making anti-corruption an integral part of crisis relief efforts. Like emergencies in the past, the covid-19 pandemic demonstrates that anti-corruption is not just a nice-to-have but can really save lives.