Today fighting corruption ranks right up there with the need to protect the environment and decrease poverty.

Fighting corrupuion was way up there on the agenda of the Global Compact meeting, attended by hundreds of CEOs from many of the world’s major multinationals, in Geneva in July. The compact includes 10 universal principles around human rights, labour rights, the environment, and, last but not least, corruption.

In South African organisations, 85% of fraudulent activities are performed by insiders, says Amir Lubashevsky, co-founder to Magix, a Johannesburg based firm specialising in enterprise risk management, business intelligence and systems integration. “Management is responsible for 55% of this fraud, while 30% is due to employees. The trick is to start with top management – without their buy-in you have lost already. Next is to make it as simple as possible to apply a system that monitors activities in order to detect internal security risks – without having to replace operating systems that already exist,” said Lubashevsky.