Which corruption risks pose the greatest threat to the Netherlands, given their potential impact and the extent to which they can be prevented or combated? Some of the 13 greatest risks concern political office holders, law enforcement officials and financial service providers. They can be corrupted by criminal organisations, private parties and state actors, for example through bribery or blackmail. This is indicated by the National Risk Assessment (NRA) Corruption of the WODC. The results of the NRA can be used to prioritise national anti-corruption policy. Public and private parties can use the NRA as a starting point for their own more specific risk analysis at organisational and/or sector level.
Greatest corruption risks
Corruption usually begins with breaches of integrity, whereby someone acts contrary to written rules or the unwritten values and standards of an organisation. This NRA provides insight into the 13 corruption threats that corruption experts consider to be the highest risk. Eight of these relate to domestic official corruption: elected representatives and political leaders, law enforcement officials and other officials within municipalities, provinces and the national government who act with a lack of integrity or act corruptly. Four threats relate to corrupt financial and non-financial service providers. The actors mentioned can be corrupted in various ways, including through bribery or (threats of) violence, by criminal organisations, (other) private parties (such as companies) or state actors (such as foreign intelligence services). One threat concerns internationally active Dutch private parties that corrupt public and/or private parties abroad. For example, by increasing their chances of winning a foreign tender through bribery.
Risk level
Corruption experts from various stakeholders involved in preventing or combating corruption identified the 13 greatest threats from a long list of 78 threats. They then assessed the potential impact of the threats and the resilience of the anti-corruption instruments. The risk level of the threats was determined by weighing the potential impact of each threat against its resilience. The experts based their assessments as much as possible on facts and cases known to them from their work. Cases of integrity violations and corruption are not always known to the police, the judiciary or other enforcement agencies, and therefore not all of the greatest threats have (recent) cases available. Nevertheless, the experts consider it plausible that these threats could occur or are already occurring.
Image: © Lammert Joustra
Increasing resilience
Despite the existence of a comprehensive set of anti-corruption tools, there is still room for improvement in the integrity and corruption prevention policies of public and private parties. Expanding the scope of the existing tools seems less urgent.
It is particularly important that both public and private parties further develop their integrity and prevention policies. For example, strengthening recruitment policies to prevent the hiring of individuals who left a previous employer due to integrity violations. But it is also about strengthening the policy on the deployment of external staff in positions that involve corruption risks, such as municipal counter staff who are deployed through a temporary employment agency. It also seems desirable to pay closer attention to compliance with integrity policy by political office holders. Resilience can be increased when managers periodically draw their employees' attention to the importance of complying with their own organisation's integrity and prevention policy and existing legislation and regulations. It helps if they set a good example themselves, promote this and create an open culture in which employees feel free to report and discuss integrity issues.
National Risk Assessment
This NRA builds on the research methods used in previous NRAs since 2017 on money laundering and terrorist financing. It examines the extent to which the (policy) instruments are capable of preventing or combating threats in the field of money laundering and terrorist financing. There is a special page (in Dutch) on National Risk Assessments , which includes an overview of previous reports.