When a company is compromised by an ethical lapse—employees might be caught making or taking bribes, management could have failed to comply with regulations, or fraud might have been committed in the course of doing business—the enterprise need not be prevented from engaging in its valuable and sometimes essential work.
Any institution that wants to protect its reputation and bottom line while engaging with one of these compromised companies can require the vendor to hire an independent integrity monitor to ensure that all work is performed to the highest ethical standards.
Integrity monitoring as a discipline was created in response to corruption in New York City’s building trades in the early 1990s. Since then, the constituency benefiting from integrity monitors has changed. Today, banks, insurance companies, pension funds, private equity firms, and other companies in regulated industries who finance nine- or ten-figure construction projects have been utilizing integrity monitors. Those monitors root out fraud and measure for productivity and efficiency as well.
Traditional audits and project management include many things, like tracking expenses, on a large construction project. These methods, however, fail to recognize the many schemes that come out of the building trades. They don’t seek out—and have little experience preventing, detecting, or remediating—fraud, waste, and abuse in real time.
Integrity Monitoring Goes Beyond Construction
The success of integrity monitoring in construction has led to a broader use of the idea in other contexts where the courts, law enforcement, and regulators recognize that stemming corruption is more valuable than extracting punishment.
Integrity monitors have been used in a wide range of industries, allowing corporations like BNY Mellon, Texaco, and AIG (and even institutions like the Penn State football program) to continue to operate despite serious lapses. Integrity monitors can be imposed by court order or as part of deferred prosecution or nonprosecution agreements. They can be mandated by government agencies, be self-imposed, or be required by private enterprises that want to enjoy the reputational benefit of knowing their large project has oversight.
How K2 Intelligence Does Integrity Monitoring
An integrity monitor’s analysis may begin with screening of contractors and subcontractors employed on a project or by a company. That screening eliminates firms that can damage a project’s reputation, finances, or objectives. The monitor can also design a code of ethics specific to the work involved and incorporate integrity provisions into all contracts entered into for the project. These provisions can include enhanced auditing, subcontractor approval, certification of noncollusive bidding, and precertification of vendors. Finally, forensic teams scrutinize invoices, change orders, and on-site work practices.
Where We Go From Here
Integrity monitors have already been required in recent settlements with financial institutions. We believe this solution will be used more in the future across a broader range of violations and industries as government seeks private solutions to oversight.
We also believe that corporations have just begun to see the value of requiring integrity monitors on projects where their presence will generate cost savings in excess of fees and provide additional reputational and operational dividends.
