Anti-bribery and corruption
risk assessments

How GoodCorporation’s ABC risk
assessments can protect your business

Effective risk assessments help organisations to identify possible exposure, design effective mitigation measures and ensure that their anti-corruption procedures are relevant and proportionate. Our anti-corruption risk assessments are tailored to the needs of an organisation and can be conducted at group or local level, as appropriate. Anti-bribery risk assessments should be carried out periodically,  but especially in response to any significant changes to the nature or scope of the organisation. However, according to our most recent study, this is an area that businesses struggle to do well. Forty percent of the ABC risk assessment procedures we have evaluated were found to be inadequate. 

Companies that use our ABC risk assessments are able to:

Understand their specific
corruption risks

Classify risks into four categories:
low, medium, high and extreme

Evaluate risks according
to defined impact and likelihood

Identify appropriate and
proportionate risk mitigation actions

Produce a clear picture of ABC
risks to the company

Help mitigate the likelihood of prosecution by ensuring that the company can demonstrate it has adequate procedures in place to address the bribery and corruption risks faced

Why anti-bribery risk assessments are one of the hardest anti-corruption controls to get right

The GoodCorporation paper Combating Corruption: are businesses still at risk? revealed that 40% of the risk assessment procedures evaluated by GoodCorporation were inadequate. The purpose of conducting a risk assessment is to systematically identify the risks to which a company may be exposed in relation to its activities; in this case the bribery and or corruption risks the business may face. Any organisation that fails to conduct a robust and specific bribery risk assessment cannot be confident its anti-bribery and corruption (ABC) programmes are addressing its risks sufficiently.

Consequently, companies that have not properly assessed the full extent of any corruption risks remain vulnerable to corruption within their organisation. Not only that, they are also limited in their ability to demonstrate an adequate procedures or effective compliance defence. Our paper also showed a significant gap emerging between the top and bottom companies. In the bottom quartile 81% of the risk assessment controls assessed were deemed inadequate. This compares to only 8% inadequacy on the top performing organisations.