It should be obvious that you do not expect your employees and business partners to be involved in bribery and corruption or tax evasion. However, there is a benefit to pointing it out.
There are two corporate offences:
● Commercial organisations failing to prevent bribery; and
● Commercial organisations failing to prevent facilitation of tax evasion
In both cases these are strict liability offences – that means that no blame has to be put on the commercial organisation. If it happens you are guilty.
There is however a defence – you have to be able to show that you have in place reasonable prevention procedures.
At the very least you should therefore have in place contractual requirements on your employees, suppliers, customers, agents under which they agree not to participate in bribery or corruption or tax evasion or the facilitation of tax evasion and have an appropriate policy in place.
