Last week the European Commission published its first-ever report on the state of anti-corruption programs across the European Union. If American compliance and audit executives want to understand how different the challenges in Europe actually are—if you want to appreciate the fundamental gulfs in how Europeans and Americans view corruption, and how to address its threats—then dig into this report immediately.
At a cursory level, the report skims across all types of corruption, across all member states of the European Union. I never even knew the names of the anti-corruption agencies in Latvia, Slovenia, or Catalonia, much less how well they do their jobs—but the report looks at all of them, plus 25 other EU states, from Ireland in the east to Cyprus in the west. If you want to lose yourself in the minutiae of European bureaucracy, this report is an excellent tool to do just that.
