Förderung der Corporate Compliance: „Mehr Zuckerbrot als Peitsche?“ *

Abstract

The article deals with questions related to “fraud risk management”. After defining the terms “compliance”, “governance” and “risk management”, the author focuses on the special risk of committing a crime inside a company or of crimes arising from corporate activities. This category of crimes constitutes its own sector within Risk Management and is called “fraud risk management”. The problem of “fraud risk management” is that it is very difficult first to identify a risk and then to communicate it. In these cases of economic crime the risk is related to the company itself or even to colleagues or superiors. Therefore, internal risk communication has to be guaranteed. If such communication cannot take place, the “whistleblower” has to be protected, as intended for example in the United States by the Sarbanes Oxley Act. For Europe, the question of how to guarantee corporate compliance remains. Referring to the title of the article, the “stick” is represented by the criminal law, which could even be extended by a special corporate criminal law. But there is also a need for a “carrot”. Each company should guarantee a minimum level of measures to prevent economic crime and only in case these measures are not applied correctly should the law be enforced to the maximum. In order to be able to fulfil its obligation to deal with risk information, management should be granted the necessary instruments.