Background Screening As An Anti-Bribery Tool

By: Integrity

In the stages of establishing an Anti-Bribery Management System (ABMS), after corporations identify the risks of bribery in its business processes, these corporations should then build an ABMS as a solution to reduce the discovered risks. However, having ABMS in place is not enough, as corporations must be determined and provide the resources needed to implement, maintain and continuously improve their system. Therefore, corporations need resources to support that, one of which is human resource support.

Clause 7.2 in ISO 37001 ABMS requires corporations to have procedures to ensure that:

1. All employees comply with the company's anti-bribery policy and risk management system
2. Employees receive a copy of the company's anti-bribery policy and attend training related to the policy
3. Employees who violate the policy are subjected to disciplinary action
4. Employees must not be subject to any form of retaliation for being whistleblowers or reporters of alleged violations.

In other words, the procedures require corporations to ensure that their employees whose activities have a potential impact on anti-bribery performance to be competent on the basis of education, training, and experience.

In addition to conducting training for their employees, corporations are required to carry out compliance procedures by conducting background screening of prospective employees before they are hired.

"Basically, when a corporation is committed to implementing ABMS, then it should add more criteria which are relevant to ABMS,” said Winarso S.H, M.H, an ISO 37001 consultant and experienced legal practitioner.

“Let’s say an employee holds an HR training position in a corporation, it is certain that they must have background or experience in training. However, when the corporation implements ABMS, important criteria are added, such as that the employee must not have a track record regarding bribery, corruption or other violations, "he explained.

"With the added criteria, therefore the corporation must conduct background screening to ensure that prospective employee or the existing employee does not have such a track record," he continued.

Based on the ISO, corporations should also conduct continuous background screening and periodic evaluations of employee performance, bonuses, and incentives to ensure they have reasonable 'safeguards' to prevent them from carrying out bribery, corruption, misconduct and other violations.

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