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The importance of managing integrity risk
In an earlier article, I highlighted that due to changes in both legislation and societal expectations, businesses need to be more aware of the growing importance of managing Integrity Risk within their compliance programs. Furthermore, the most effective way to mitigate this risk is for businesses to implement a fully integrated integrity risk program that includes the critical elements of policy management and attestation, employee policy knowledge surveys, conflict of interest registers, gift and entertainment registers and incident reporting.
To be fully effective, businesses also need to continually monitor their integrity risk programs for compliance and employee engagement, otherwise they can be at serious risk of bad behaviours going unnoticed and an integrity risk event occurring.
Because many integrity risk programs are manual, ad hoc and not centralised, the critical elements such as policy management, policy explanation videos, employee policy attestation and surveys, conflict of interest registers, gift and entertainment registers, incident reporting and communications are difficult to monitor collectively to identify key areas requiring immediate attention. The multiple elements and detailed employee data also make it difficult to assess the overall effectiveness of the program.
How to monitor the effectiveness of your integrity risk program?
The easiest way to gauge the effectiveness of an Integrity Risk program is to integrate all the elements of a “best practice” program into a centralised, integrated software platform combined with a reporting dashboard tool to monitor activity, display key performance indicators and analyse the data. This enables a single measure of the effectiveness of the program to be calculated from the software database.
Corethix has developed an algorithm within the Corethix software platform that calculates a value from the database called the Integrity Risk Index.
The Integrity Risk Index has been developed by the Corethix team based on industry research and our knowledge of the key requirements for a business to have an effective and legislatively compliant Integrity Risk program that could mitigate the occurrence of an Integrity Risk event occurring.
The Integrity Risk Index is a measure for businesses to simply, and accurately, know the effectiveness of their current integrity risk programs and the areas requiring targeted attention. It is calculated by an algorithm within the program that gathers data on policies, survey results, conflict of interest registers, gift and entertainment registers and incident reports and produces a value that defines the effectiveness of the program. For simplicity, the Integrity Risk Index is displayed as a score between 0 to 100 with the higher the score, the more effective the program is in protecting against integrity risk. It is calculated each month to provide businesses with ongoing feedback of the effectiveness of their integrity risk programs and can be used as a guide to improve compliance and employee engagement.
What is your integrity risk score?
Complete our quick survey and find out your score
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