A survey of respondents around the world, conducted by KPMG International, shows that companies are rising to the challenge but that a great deal more needs to be done to create a sturdy ABC compliance structure. For full details, read the report Anti-bribery and corruption: Rising to the challenge in the age of globalization. 

The main findings of the survey include:

• There is a sharp increase in the proportion of respondents who say they are highly challenged by the issue of ABC, compared with a survey KPMG conducted almost five years earlier. The proportion of U.S. and UK respondents who say it is highly challenging has jumped by more than 50 percent. 
• As companies continue to globalize, their management of third parties pose the greatest challenge in managing ABC programs, ranking first in terms of auditing third parties for compliance and third in conducting due diligence over them. 
  
• Despite the difficulty of monitoring their business dealings with third parties, more than one third of the respondents do not formally identify high-risk third parties. More than half of those respondents with right-to-audit clauses over third parties have not exercised these rights. 
  
• Nearly two thirds of companies indicated that M&A is part of their growth strategy, however global business comes up short when considering ABC risks; in fact many are unaware of the consequences of failing to identify these risks during the acquisition phase. 
  
• Respondents complain they lack the resources to manage ABC risk, ranking fourth overall among the top challenges facing the survey’s respondents. 
  
• A top-down risk assessment would help companies set priorities, but executives admit that an ABC risk assessment is one of their companies’ top challenges. 
  
• Data analytics is an increasingly important and cost-effective tool to assess ABC controls. Yet only a quarter of respondents use data analysis to identify violations and of those that do so, less than half continuously monitor data to spot potential violations