At the moment, companies make a voluntary decision whether to implement measures and practices that enable them to build a business culture based on responsibility, good governance and transparency.

Against this backdrop, Transparency International Spain has published this guide * to help companies to conduct their self-assessments in order to strengthen their policies in the areas of regulatory compliance, corporate governance, prevention of corruption and public disclosure country by country. It is a tool for measuring and assessing the quality of the programmes in these areas and for supporting improvements to companies’ reporting levels.

Each of the issues listed above can make use of the following: obligatory regulatory compliance indicators, voluntary compliance indicators and recommended compliance indicators. There are 273 in all, of which 144 are self-diagnosed, while 129 cover reporting.

The results obtained from this self-assessment are grouped into three levels: moderate, medium or maximum, enabling companies to know their level of compliance.

The Guide addresses mainly listed Spanish companies, because of the homogeneous nature of their business profiles. Nevertheless, it is valuable for both major, non-listed corporations and for small and medium sized firms. The Guide recommends that the self-diagnosis be conducted by the department heads of Compliance, Corporate Governance, Legal, Internal Audit and Corporate Transparency, or their equivalents.

 

You may also find these interesting:

• Detailed good practice guidelines for applying the “comply or explain” principle (Spain’s National Securities Commission)
• Guidelines of basic principles for MSMEs (Jamaica)