The CGMA recently released their 2012 Report on Global Ethics.  There’s good news – and – bad news.

While there is an increase in the use of ethics policies, there is a perception that corporate leadership is less actively involved in ensuring the ethics of the organization.  The board and chief executives were less likely to be identified as responsible for ethics relative to the 2008 survey.

The number of organizations that report on their ethics standards performance is low.  Monitoring of ethics standards is important to identify and fix gaps; but, 37% of participants thought the monitoring of ethics standards was lacking.  35% of employees felt under pressure to compromise their organization’s ethics standards.

Almost half of the organizations provided ethics hotlines.  While this is an increase from the previous survey, the overall number is low given that hotlines are inexpensive and have proven high return on investment in reduced fraud losses and time to discovery.  The most recent ACFE survey found that fraud losses were reduced by 67% when a hotline was in use and the fraud discovery timeframe was cut in half.

For those organizations that do not have a hotline or are still providing one in house, they can contact Ethical Advocate for a quote or to get more information.