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PROSA Product Sustainability Assessment
offered or demanded. While offering bribes is clearly seen as a violation of anti corruption
principles, the topic of demanded bribes is more difficult. Especially in less regulated
economies, business operations may sometimes turn impossible without paying such
informal „speed money“. This is mostly the case in the relation between business operations
and the public administration. In some very difficult environments like war zones, even
international humanitarian operations do sometimes involve in this form of corruption.
For the evaluation of corruption in life cycle assessments four forms of bribe transfers must
be considered:
• Bribes offered by an enterprise or one of its representatives
• Bribes demanded by another party
• Bribes accepted by an enterprise or one of its representatives
• Bribes demanded by an enterprise or one of its representatives
Indicators on corruption
Indicator 1: „Documented cases of corruption“
The most obvious indicator to measure corruption seems to be a check on past corruption
cases of the surveyed company. With this information, corruption may also be quantified by
the frequency and monetary value of bribes and gifts. Nevertheless, this information will
always be available only in those few cases where corruption was revealed and documented
by third parties. Although this approach is quite limited, there are several attempts being
made to systematically collect such corruption reports for further analysis. This includes the
following data sources:
• The NGO Business & Human Rights Resource Centre collects information on CSR
aspects of companies and sectors and provides this information in its online library. The
data collection includes press releases and newspaper articles on business related
scandals, activities and CSR approaches. Although corruption cases are included in the
collection, it is not a focus of the organisation’s work.
• The Ethical Investment Research Service collects information on social and
environmental scandals of individual companies and compiles the data in a given format.
• The website of UNICORN (United against corruption) collects documented cases of
corruption.
All this sources have in common that they only yield corruption cases that entered
international news reporting. Therefore they are mostly limited to well known multinational
companies. Minor corruption cases that only entered local news reporting are widely ignored.
This has severe repercussions for this information to be used in life cycle assessments: With
only using these data sources it would appear as if only the big companies would be involved
in corrupt practices. However it is known from other CSR topics that small companies are
more vulnerable to the violation of CSR-standards. This may be due to fact, that
multinationals are more closely observed by whistleblowers and administrative bodies.
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