Prevention

Prevention is the most efficient and cost-effective way to minimise the risk of corruption, and it can also remove or reduce the harmful impact of corruption and protect organisations or governments from reputational damage. Investing in prevention helps to maintain public trust and confidence in the PNG government’s ability to effectively counter corruption.

The ICAC seeks to prevent and reduce corruption in the PNG government in four key approaches:

  • Investigating it thoroughly and reporting on what is discovered.  
  • Identifying and highlighting best practice across PNG and internationally.  
  • Promoting collaboration and good governance across the PNG government.
  • Educating the public sector (and the public) about corruption, and how to prevent it in the future.

The best way for you to learn how to prevent corruption is to engage with the ICAC and our materials. You can follow us on social media, attend our events, read our publications and above all, try to do the right thing. This includes holding yourself to a high standard of integrity and reporting corrupt conduct by others. Learn more about how to report corrupt conduct here. 

The ICAC’s Prevention activities will commence in 2024. We will be creating new content and working with domestic and international partners to roll out a sequence of activities.

What the ICAC can do to prevent corrupt conduct

The ICAC is empowered to carry out a prevention function by section 33 of the Organic Law on the Independent Commission Against Corruption (OLICAC). Without limiting how the ICAC may prevent and reduce corrupt conduct, the ICAC may do the following:

 

  1. Undertake or commission research; or
  2. Review and make recommendations regarding the systems, strategies, policies, practices and procedures or any public body or public official; or
  3. Undertake or commission education, training or awareness, to the public generally or to a particular section of the public or private sector, including educational institutions; or
  4. Enlist and foster public support for prevention and reducing corrupt conduct; or
  5. Analyse information regarding complaints, investigations and prosecutions; or
  6. Make recommendations for legal, operational or policy reforms; or
  7. Publish recommendations, research, reports, policies or guidelines and provide such material to other agencies and bodies; or
  8. Make public statements necessary for its purposes under OLICAC or regarding the powers or functions of the Commission; or
  9. Work in cooperation with other agencies and bodies, including other public sector agencies and bodies, the media, civil society, educational institutions, and the private sector.

What can you do to prevent corrupt conduct

Everyone

  • Understand what corruption is
  • Understand your role in preventing corrupt conduct
  • Know how to report corrupt conduct
  • Engage with ICAC events.

Public officials

  • Understand what corruption is
  • Understand your role in preventing corrupt conduct
  • Understand how corruption occurs and support the implementation of controls that prevent corruption
  • Take the risk of corruption into consideration when planning and conducting your work
  • Know how to report corrupt conduct
  • Establish and implement controls to prevent and reduce corruption in your organization
  • Protect people who report corrupt conduct
  • Help others to understand their roles and how to report corruption
  • Engage with ICAC events.

Corruption controls

Understanding how corrupt officials succeed is important for creating prevention initiatives and interventions. The key to preventing and reducing corrupt conduct is to address it from three perspectives:

  • Influencing an individual’s behaviour
    • this could include corporate messages on appropriate behaviour and integrity, ensuring poor behaviour is addressed and having clear guidance/procedures in place. Additionally, you can influence behaviour by holding officials accountable for their key roles in the systems and processes.
  • Implementing stronger controls in an operating system
    • this could include adding approval checkpoints, conducting suitability checks during recruitment, implementing a strong gift and benefit policy and conflict of interest policy, sufficient resourcing for audit and control staff and protecting sensitive information.
  • Learning from detected corruption events
    • This could include working with the ICAC or other law enforcement or integrity bodies to identify how the corruption occurred, and actively making fixes to your processes and corporate messages/policies so that method of corruption is closed down to officials.

Once the right controls are in place and people are aware of their key roles, an agency could then choose to test if the countermeasures are working as intended. The ICAC will call this activity ‘control testing’, but it can also be called ‘pressure testing’ or ‘penetration testing’. This testing can help you identify weaknesses in the system that may allow corrupt officials to act. It can help you to identify solutions and strengthen your systems to prevent and detect corruption.

The ICAC will be creating guidance on corruption controls, corruption risk assessments and how to create anti-corruption policies for your entity. Once developed, it will be loaded on this website.

Risk assessments

Corruption Risk Assessments (CRA) can help you and your organization understand how corruption could occur, potential weaknesses in a control system and how to prioritise action. You could also use this assessment to identify the processes or projects that have the highest risk for corrupt conduct.

CRAs play an important role in promoting the proper use and management of government resources and establishing and maintaining appropriate systems to control the risk of corruption events. If risks are actively managed (including governance, oversight, and control testing) you can provide assurance that their risks are being managed.

A CRA is a systematic process to identify and analyse risks to your organisation, and, if required, determine what risk treatments are needed to keep the potential likelihood and consequences of risks to within the entity’s pre-defined levels of risk appetite or tolerance. An assessment of fraud risk and corruption risk can be conducted and documented together or separately. To proactively address corruption, you must establish and maintain an ongoing awareness of their threat environment and processes. The CRA should consider all significant factors likely to affect an entity’s exposure to corruption risks, including what assets (including information) need protection and what internal and external pressures affect risks.

Training and awareness

The ICAC is establishing its prevention and awareness team from mid-2024. The ICAC will create training content for:

  • Government specialists
    • corruption risk assessments, corruption polices and key controls.
  • Government officials
    • Introduction to the ICAC, how to prevent and report corruption, how to consider corrupt risk in your workplace.
  • The public
    • Introduction to the ICAC, how to report corruption.

As courses become available, or content is finalized we will update this webpage.

Engage with the ICAC

The ICAC will be engaging at the national, provincial, district and local level across PNG. This engagement will also extend to stakeholders from government, civil society, and non-government organisations.

The ICAC’s prevention and engagement team can offer:

  • Presentations
  • Workshops
  • Visit to your community group/school or province/district
  • Event appearance (open/close event or keynote etc.)
  • Brochures/posters to print, and more!

Please contact us at engagement@icac.gov.pg to understand our service offer and make requests. The ICAC may be able to assist you, based on our existing schedule and priorities.

You can join our mailing list here:


    If your email is about an international engagement (conferences/events), please contact international@icac.gov.pg