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PROSA Product Sustainability Assessment
Furthermore, big companies have to fear the risk of loosing their good brand name
reputation. Engaging in corruption is therefore a much bigger risk for big companies than for
small enterprises.
Although one may argue, that systematic case documentation is improving, a comprehensive
list of cases is not foreseeable: Even if all corruption news from minor newspapers would be
included, there are still a vast amount of revealed corruption cases that never entered news
reporting at all and that are only documented in the according court documents.
Furthermore this indicator is also limited, since most corruption cases are never revealed at
all.
Indicator 2: „Programmes and policies to prevent corruption“
In a similar form, this indicator was proposed by the OECD Guidelines for Multinational
Enterprises and the Sustainability Reporting Guidelines (2002 Version) and provides an
easy-to-measure tool. Nevertheless recent developments (Sustainability Reporting
Guidelines Version 2006) mark a shift away from this kind of indicators, since policies and
programmes do not necessarily correlate with actual business practices. The current draft
version of the Sustainability Reporting Guidelines proposes to use the indicators „extent of
training and risk analysis to prevent corruption“ and „actions taken in response to instances
of corruption“ in sustainability reporting instead. These approaches seem not feasible for
SLCAs for similar reasons.
Indicator 3: International corruption rankings
For several years, Transparency International publishes the annual Corruption Perception
Index, a ranking of countries according to its perceived level of corruption. Although
Transparency International clearly refers to the ranking’s weaknesses, it quickly gained
popularity and is frequently used in many studies to quantify the level of corruption in a
certain location. The reason why the Corruption Perception Index became such a famous
tool is the fact that it provides a simple quantification for the seemingly immeasurable topic of
corruption. For the use in SLCA, such an easy-to-use ranking could also be of great value: If
we would know in which region companies are more prone to corrupt practices, we would
have a base to start from for any further evaluations.
Unfortunately the Corruption Perception Index does not seem to be fully appropriate for
SLCA applications for the following reason: The index measures the public perception of
government corruption. Corruption within the business world and the willingness of
businesses to pay bribes is excluded.
Transparency International developed another index, which has the Potenzial to complement
the Corruption Perception Index for SLCA applications: The Bribe Payers Index is one of the
few approaches to systematically measures corruption in the business world. It surveys the
willingness of multinational companies to pay bribes to high ranking officials in emerging
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