@Risk

One year after enforcement of the UK Bribery Act began, less than one-tenth (9.3 percent) of those polled during a recent Deloitte webcast are concerned about it and just 24.2 percent have changed their anti-corruption programs to comply. Yet, 62.6 percent of the respondents say the financial crisis has increased corporate corruption globally.

While UK Bribery Act enforcement seems to be off to a slow start with the United Kingdom’s Serious Fraud Office only having prosecuted one criminal case under the Act, Deloitte’s research shows that U.S. enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act continues at a strong pace, particularly in its focus on individual executives.

More than half (51.1 percent) of respondents expect the number of executives individually charged with corruption violations will increase in the second half of 2012.

The onus of determining the difference between customary and excessive gifts still lies heavily with companies the poll shows. In countries where a significant portion of certain industries – like healthcare or oil and gas – are government-run, efforts to prevent bribes of government employees are constantly evolving to respond to the ever changing schemes designed by employees to circumvent controls.

About Deloitte’s Anticorruption Poll

Deloitte polled more than 1,200 business professionals from the life sciences, banking and securities, technology, retail and distribution, consumer products, insurance and other sectors during a recent webcast titled, “The Changing Global Anticorruption Legal Landscape.” For more information about the poll, please click here.

Next week, weI’ll be presenting a webinar with GE, examining how the global behemoth with over $150BB in revenue, and active in industries ranging from aerospace to finance to high tech manufacturing, manages its over 750,000 vendors world-wide.

As could be expected, GE’s original SIM challenges were many:

• Complex supply chain spanning numerous verticals with significantly different data collection needs that over the years had led to disparate systems with inadequate data schema, and multiple gaps around supplier data regarding certifications, compliance, and contracts
• Poor spend visibility from missing or inaccurate data points – e.g. categorization – and inadequate processes in general
• Vendor proliferation – there are 700,000 global suppliers post cleanup!
• Global organization needing multiple interface languages, not only the corporate English but also French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Chinese and others

As early as the 1990s, GE internally identified their vendor information management situation as an issue. Over the years, as technology has developed, GE has worked toward a remedy.  The advent of SaaS solutions in combination with current SIM and master data management (MDM) thinking finally led to a breakthrough for GE – which is when they adopted the Aravo SIM platform.

With Aravo, GE has now managed to create one globally deployed vendor master management solution (“GSL”) that addresses their need for a single source of truth when managing all suppliers across the entire GE organization.  Other benefits with this global single instance approach are:

• Full visibility and enablement of vendor management automation
• Lower operating costs by removal of redundant vendor management solutions
• Consistent data collection to meet compliance and regulatory needs

There is more to the story than this brief post can address!  We’ll be sharing more details around how GE has driven supplier information management success – including Spend Matters commentary on setting up supplier management technology implementations right from the start – on this June 20 Aravo webinar (click here to register).

Just days after the Senate overwhelming approved legislation to better protect the nation’s drug supply, the House of Representatives last night followed suit, passing the Food and Drug Administration Reform Act of 2012 (H.R. 5651) in a 387-5 vote. The Bulk Pharmaceuticals Task Force (BPTF), an affiliate of the Society of Chemical Manufacturers and Affiliates (SOCMA), welcomed the vote and urged House and Senate conferees to quickly agree on a final bill for the president’s signature.

H.R. 5651 includes authorization of the Generic Drug User Fee Act (GDUFA), legislation that would improve the drug supply chain by requiring inspection of all foreign and domestic drug production facilities. BPTF, a key industry stakeholder, has advocated since 2006 for increased resources for the FDA to conduct more inspections of foreign drug ingredient manufacturers, and they worked with other industry groups last year to negotiate the terms included in GDUFA.

“With last night’s vote, the U.S. will make significant strides in ensuring that our drug supply is less susceptible to sub-par drugs from facilities with lax quality compliance standards,” said BPTF Chair Patty Benson, Quality Assurance Director of SAFC. “We urge quick action by both House and Senate conferees to agree on a final bill that the president can sign as soon as possible.”

The generic drug industry will pay approximately $1.5 billion over five years in return for faster and more predictable review of generic drug applications, according to the terms of GDUFA. This will help reduce drug shortages and bring drugs to market faster. The legislation also allows the FDA to perform inspections on a risk basis, focusing on the facilities posing the greatest risk to drug safety.