More than half of workers believe corruption, bribery risk is low - Deloitte survey

A new survey shows more than 60 percent of workers believe the risk of corruption or bribery at their workplace is low, but a Deloitte Partner says it is naive for companies to think they can dodge such activities.

Deloitte's Australia and New Zealand Bribery and Corruption Report for 2023 surveyed 130 workers on their experiences and perspectives of bribery and corruption risk at their workplaces.

It found 61 percent of respondents perceived bribery and corruption to be a low or very low risk to their organisation, despite tougher economic conditions, including high interest rates and inflation and adverse weather events in Australia and New Zealand.

Survey participants included senior executives, board members, General Counsel and risk managers from a variety of sectors, including ASX200 and NZX50 companies, public sector organisations, not-for-profit organisations and other private sector companies.

Nearly 90 percent said they had had no known instances of domestic bribery and corruption at their workplace.

However, Deloitte partner Lorinda Kelly said all of the triggers for corruption or bribery were present, and companies needed to be proactive.

"Corruption can occur when anyone misuses power for gain, it can be for themselves, or for others," Kelly said.

"Certainly, the ingredients have all existed recently for corruption to be occurring: there's the opportunity driven by circumstances, where we have a lot of funds flowing around dealing with crises, there's motivation that arises from financial difficulties and upheaval, so there's certainly risks in place," she said.

"I would say it's perhaps wishful thinking for people to think that there's really low risk in their own organisations."

Kelly said providing confidential information to a third party and undisclosed conflicts of interest were the most common types of corruption respondents experienced.

"Accept that you could have risks in your organisation, and then really identify where your risks could lie," she advised.

"You don't have to look under every stone but certainly in each organisation, there will be more obvious areas where the risks could be.

"Also, every organisation has a lot of data that doesn't get used, so use data as well to help you to detect unusual activity."

Of those surveyed, 51 percent said they had limited or no working knowledge or were unsure of the corruption legislation that applied to their workplace, suggesting a knowledge gap which companies could work to fill, Kelly said.

For those with incidents, the most common form of detection was a tip through a confidential reporting mechanism (56 percent of respondents with incidents reported this as an identification method).

Other survey findings:

• 61 percent of respondents perceive bribery and corruption to be low or very low risk to their organisation.
• 94 percent of respondents believe that their preventative controls were partially effective or effective.
• Key factors preventing risk assessments; Competing priorities (55 percent), limited in-house competency (50 percent) and resource constraints (43 percent).
• Reputational risk was cited by 70 percent of survey respondents as the worst consequence of a corruption incident.