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Is your business institutionally dishonest?

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Think your business is above board? It’s easy to tick the box for one area of integrity, but what about the rest? Like a game of Trivial Pursuit, true honesty means collecting all the wedges – from culture and incentives to leadership and communication. Our campaign explores how the rot of dishonesty can creep in, often unnoticed, through systemic factors and everyday decisions. With the help of external experts, we’ll help you uncover the hidden risks, challenge assumptions, and ask the tough questions: is your organisation truly playing fair, or just playing the game?

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Organisational culture

Embedding Compliance Through Culture

Leadership compliance (or lack of it) will directly impact on the culture of an organisation. In organisations where leaders ignore legal and ethical obligations, the culture is often damaged, resulting in negative behaviour trickling down the organisation.

With the expansion of corporate liability through failure to prevent ("FTP") offences ongoing, and with recent high-profile public inquiries in mind, businesses will (or should be) increasingly considering the role that organisational culture plays in allowing, or preventing, criminal offences from being committed by persons associated with it. To limit legal risk, it is essential that organisations implement a positive culture that is integrated into every part of their business.

Since the implementation of the failure to prevent bribery offence in 2011, and the publication of the corresponding "adequate procedures" guidance, organisations have been aware of the importance of "top-level commitment" in setting the anti-bribery agenda.

Principle 2 of the guidance states that "The top-level management of a commercial organisation (be it a board of directors, the owners or any other equivalent body or person) are committed to preventing bribery by persons associated with it. They foster a culture within the organisation in which bribery is never acceptable." The recently published FTP fraud guidance contains similar wording, noting that an organisation's board, partners, and senior management should "foster a culture within the organisation in which fraud is never acceptable and should reject profit based on, or assisted by, fraud." In a similar vein, corporates commit an offence if they fail to prevent criminal facilitation of tax evasion and also have a legal duty to prevent sexual harassment of their employees.

Increasingly, therefore, the onus is on businesses to demonstrate that they foster a culture that discourages misconduct and does not allow them to simply blame any misconduct that does occur on a few "bad apples".  

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