Topic Guide: Conflicts of Interest

Conflict of interest and monitoring financial assets. Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), 2004. http://www.osce.org/eea/13738?download=true  

Chapter three of the OSCE report Best Practices in Combating Corruption (pp.28-41) provides two checklists: (1) to help individual public servants identify situations where a conflict of interest is likely to arise and (2) to assess whether a disclosed conflict of interest might require other public officials to ask the person in question to stand aside. It also examines in detail how to avoid nepotism and cronyism in public sector appointments, suggests methods to monitor public officials' income and provides best practice examples of post-public sector employment restrictions for government ministers.  

Managing conflicts of interest in the public sector: Toolkit and guidelines. Australian Independent Commission against Corruption, 2004.  

Although now over ten years old, this toolkit with companion guidelines offer an excellent overview of how to build an integrity system to avoid and mitigate conflicts of interest in the public sector. The toolkit offers informative methods to develop and implement a conflict of interest policy and what to do once it is in place, while the guidelines provide useful background on why such policies are important, key definitions, guiding principles and a host of training resources.  

Managing conflicts of interest in the public sector: A toolkit. OECD, 2005. http://www.oecd.org/gov/ethics...  

Experience shows that identifying and resolving conflicts of interest can be difficult to achieve in practice. To overcome this barrier, in 2005, the OECD developed a practical toolkit focusing on specific techniques, resources and strategies for the identification, management and prevention of conflict of interest situations. It provides non-technical, practical help to enable officials to recognise problematic situations. The tools are based on examples of sound conflict of interest policies and practices drawn from OECD member and non-member countries. The toolkit provides a set of practical tools to manage conflicts of interest in accordance with the OECD guidelines for managing conflict of interest in the public service and which are suitable to be adapted in countries with different legal and administrative systems. It includes objective tests for identifying a conflict of interest, a generic checklist for identifying at risk areas for conflicts of interest, relevant ethics code provisions, a conflict of interest self-test, a gifts and gratuities checklist and hypothetical training cases.  

Managing conflict of interest: Frameworks, tools, and instruments for preventing, detecting, and managing conflict of interest. Asia Development Bank (ADB)/OECD, 2008. http://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/27975/managing-conflict-interest.pdf  

This report is a resource for both practitioners and policy makers to support the development of new frameworks, tools and instruments for detecting and managing conflicts of interest to curb corruption in the Asia and Pacific region. The three sections cover definitions and conceptual frameworks, legal and regulatory tools and preventive measures (such as codes of conduct and organisational culture). The study is essentially a compilation of analyses and conclusions from an Asia-Pacific regional seminar in 2007, which brought together more than 150 experts from 23 of the ADB's Anti-Corruption Initiative’s member countries and jurisdictions, and there are several interesting country case studies, including Korea, Indonesia and the Philippines.  

Conflicts of interest: A good practice guide. Northern Ireland Audit Office, 2015. http://www.niauditoffice.gov.uk/conflicts_of_interest_good_practice_guide.pdf  

This guide seeks to provide clear and simple advice relevant throughout the public sector to help organisations draft and implement conflict of interest policies. It also aims to help board members and staff in key positions to recognise when they have a conflict of interest and how they should act when such a situation arises. The guide includes examples of good practice as well as case illustrations of all types of conflicts of interests with the associated problems and possible solutions. Usefully, the guide provides a typology of conflicts of interest and specifies what to do when the policy is breached. Several appendixes offer good practice examples and sample declaration of interest forms.