Control Risks has published the results of its annual survey of business attitudes to corruption, comprising interviews with 824 companies worldwide.
Key findings include:
- Corruption risks continue to deter investors, with 30 percent of those surveyed saying that they have decided not to conduct business in specific countries because of the perceived risk of corruption.
- Corruption is a widespread business risk, with 41 percent of global respondents reported that the risk of corruption was the primary reason they pulled out of a deal on which they had already spent time and money.
- The picture is improving. Companies from countries with tight enforcement report fewer losses than before from corrupt competitors. In 2006, 44 percent of US companies said they had lost out to corrupt competitors, compared with only 24 percent in 2015. These figures are similar for Germany and the UK.
- 81 percent of respondents agree that international anti-corruption laws “improve the business environment for everyone” but there is still more to do. The survey shows that there are still wide variations in the maturity of company programmes. In the worst case, conventional compliance approaches can increase risk because they lead to a misguided sense of complacency. The survey also found that third party risk is still relatively unrecognised. Just 58 percent of global respondents have procedures in place for due diligence assessments of third parties and only 43 assessments have third-party audit rights.
The full survey can be downloaded here.
