CII Convened the 1st Roundtable Interaction between Chief Vigilance Officers (CVOs) of the Public Sector and their counterparts, the Compliance Officers from the Private Sector on 24th November 2015. It was organised in partnership with Vigilance Study Circle, Delhi and NCR chapter.
First among a series of similar interactions that are being planned for the next year – these interactions will seek to identify and deliberate enablers and barriers towards setting up compliance and transparency best practices both within the private and public sector.
Key issues that were discussed during this Interaction included Leveraging technology, structure and autonomy of Vigilance related administration, promoting preventive vigilance, creation of conducive compliance climate, business ethics and fraud risk prevention and Forensics.
Mr Salil Singhal – Co-Chair, CII Agriculture Council and CMD, PI Industries Ltd – Welcomed the guests and spoke of the growing awareness and commitment of the private sector in setting up transparent governance by employing compliance officers, mandating the whistle-blower policies and building organisational structures that have confidence in redressals and management protection.
Mr. Parvez Hayat – President, Vigilance Study Circle (Delhi – NCR Chapter) – said that there are learnings from each side. CVOs and Compliance Officers should be aware of the laws and tools to address the issue of corruption. The CVOs of public sector had a wide mandate covering their responsibility.
Mr KV Chowdary – Central Vigilance Commissioner defined corrupt practices as essentially those that do not follow laid down procedures, which also amounts to a lack of integrity. Offering interesting anecdotes to elucidate instances of corruption – illicit and implicit, he stressed on the necessity to identify what situation would most likely lead to corruption and devising ways to pre-empt and prevent it. He also highlighted challenges that the private sector faces in enforcing ethical practice due to constraints in budget and resources. While the public sector has many checks and balances for example Financial Intelligence Units, checks on suspicious transactions especially of individuals in Public Service with Political exposure, as well as Tax returns filed by Government employees. He also suggested a 5 pronged approach towards building more stringent compliance and Transparency norms among the private sector –
· The need to put in place an Ethics Code,
· Identification of Risk areas,
· Assessment of risk and probability of its occurrence,
· Mitigation and
· Awareness building – he underlined the necessity to know every clause and condition in the tendering process as well as how integrity Pacts work.
Mr Chowdary lauded the efforts of CII and Vigilance Study Circle (Delhi – NCR Chapter) for convening such interactions and encouraged the private sector to approach CVC freely with the objective to share and exchange technical and investigative support and ideas on effectively planting seeds of anti-corruption.
Mr Sumit Makhija, Senior Director, Deloitte Touche Tomatsu India LLP – stressed the paramount need to prevent corrupt practices and suggested raising awareness among public towards Zero tolerance for fraud, introducing more number of fast track courts so the outcomes may not be diluted due to processes, training and sensitizing top managements, due diligence of parties and open mechanisms for people to freely report corrupt behaviour.
New Delhi
24th November 2015