Corporate integrity

Corporate integrity is a hard concept to define. Certainly it appears that the controls to enforce integrity will vary according to the organisation concerned. And these controls are often fragmented, since integrity embraces such a wide range of areas. However, corporate integrity goes beyond compliance and should be embedded within the culture of the organisation – which means that it is led from the top.

If integrity is to some extent intangible, the results of being seen to lack it can be horribly real and, at the worst, catastrophic. There have been many examples of organisations where failure to maintain integrity has resulted in such damage to reputation as to make recovery difficult, if not impossible. So an important element of risk management is pre-planning how the organisation will react to alleged or actual failure of its integrity. In turn, this presents a difficulty in convincing senior management of the need to plan for a situation which they may view as so unlikely as to be unworthy of consideration. In addition, the pressures and considerations relating to corporate integrity may vary according to the geographical location involved.

These are among the issues addressed by this round table discussion, which also focuses on the role of the risk manager in identifying and pulling together the many strands that compose corporate integrity.