Best Practices Anti-Corruption Program Under the UK Bribery Act Guidance Part

Sept. 24, 2010 - PRLog -- Subscribe to our RSS feed for updates on . This expert guest blog entry is part 1 of 3. Below is an excerpt from part 1.

EXCERPT

Last week the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Justice released its “Consultation on guidance about commercial organisations preventing bribery (section 9 of the Bribery Act 2010)”. The stated purpose of this document is to provide guidance, as required under section 9 of the Act, to “support businesses in determining the sorts of bribery prevention measures they can put in place.” Businesses covered by the UK Bribery Act can be convicted of a criminal offence if they fail to prevent bribery on their behalf. However, the Act provides that if the organization can show that it has adequate bribery prevention procedures in place, such “adequate procedures” are a defense to a prosecution.

The Consultation lists “Six Principles for Bribery Prevention” which the Ministry of Justice believes are good international practices for such adequate procedures and is designed to assist businesses in determining what bribery prevention procedures they can put in place. In this posting, we will provide a review of Principles 1 and 2. In subsequent postings we will review the remaining four Principles.

Initially it should be noted that the Six Principles are designed to be result oriented and to allow a flexible approach to ethics and compliance. US practitioners will observe this is in contrast to the US approach, which is much more rules based. The UK approach is to allow each company to tailor its policies and procedures so that they are proportionate to the nature, scale and complexity of its activities. Clearly there is a huge variety of circumstances; small and medium sized organizations will, for example, face different challenges compared to large multi-national enterprises. As a result, the detail of how each company addresses these principles will vary, but the outcome should always be robust with effective anti-bribery systems and controls.

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