The UK's Serious Fraud Office has updated the guidelines that it follows when it evaluating financial firms' internal systems and procedures that help them to ensure that they and their employees comply with legal requirements and internal policies and procedures. Bribery seems to be uppermost in the prosecutor's minds.

The phrase that the SFO uses to describe such a collection of systems and procedures is "a compliance programme" - not to be confused with compliance with financial regulations, although it mentions the existence of compliance units there. The latest, most recently revised chapter from the SFO's internal Operational Handbook (a loose sort of rulebook aimed at its own staff) is therefore entitled Evaluating a Compliance Programme.

It has not published the book in order to provide firms with legal advice and therefore states that it “should not therefore be relied on as the basis for any legal advice or decision” and that it published the book “solely in the interests of transparency”. It never once, moreover, mentions the details of a "compliance programme," not even linking it to fraud - a word that only appears in the footnotes or in the name of the SFO itself.

The word 'bribe,' however, appears 34 times in the paper (only 7 of which are in the footnotes). It is therefore around the SFO's stewardship of the Bribery Act 2010. It says that that Act's 'principles' (released in 2011 by the Ministry of Justice) represent a good general way ("a framework") in which it might assess firms' compliance programmes.

Summary of the six principles

There are six things, according to the Ministry of Justice, that ought to be happening at every firm.
 
Principle 1: proportionate procedures

"A commercial organisation's procedures to prevent bribery by persons associated with it [ought to be] proportionate to the bribery risks it faces and to the nature, scale and complexity of the commercial organisation's activities. They are also clear, practical, accessible, effectively implemented and enforced." The word "procedures" applies both to the policies that prohibit bribery and to the steps that the firm takes to implement them. The MoJ ties the issue of proportionality directly to the need for the commercial organisation to perform a risk assessment.

Principle 2: top-level commitment

"The top level management of a commercial organisation (be it a board of directors, the owners or any other equivalent body or person) [ought to try to prevent] bribery by persons associated with it. They [ought to] foster a culture...in which bribery is never acceptable."