A ‘Corruption Perceptions Index’ for Your Own Co.
•February 16, 2026
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Why It Matters
Employee perception of corruption directly shapes corporate culture and risk exposure, making early measurement a strategic compliance advantage.
Key Takeaways
- •Survey employees on ethical climate and witnessed misconduct.
- •Assess awareness of gift, data, and time-use policies.
- •Include executive accountability questions to gauge tone at top.
- •Use results to prioritize controls and training interventions.
- •Track index over time for cultural trend analysis.
Pulse Analysis
The global drop in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index has reminded executives that external rankings are only part of the risk picture. Internally, the perception of ethical behavior can be a stronger predictor of future violations than any audit finding. When staff believe corruption is tolerated, the informal norms shift, eroding controls and inviting regulatory scrutiny. Building a proprietary perception index lets companies capture that sentiment before it crystallizes into actual misconduct.
Creating a reliable index starts with policy clarity. Employees must know the exact parameters of gift limits, data handling, and permissible use of company resources; otherwise, survey responses become noise. A well‑designed questionnaire uses verbs like “see,” “feel,” and “witness” to tap into lived experience, and it explicitly asks whether executives are held accountable—a litmus test for tone‑at‑the‑top. Embedding anonymity and easy reporting channels further encourages honest feedback, turning the index into a true barometer of ethical climate.
The payoff is both preventive and strategic. Regularly tracking perception scores highlights emerging hotspots, enabling targeted training, tighter controls, or leadership interventions before violations surface. Over time, a rising index signals cultural improvement, which can be leveraged in stakeholder communications and risk assessments. Integrating the index with broader ESG and compliance dashboards amplifies its value, turning perception data into actionable intelligence that safeguards reputation and drives long‑term business resilience.
A ‘Corruption Perceptions Index’ for Your Own Co.
Last week Transparency International released its annual Corruption Perceptions Index, which presented a rather depressing decline in clean government around the world. Today I want to take that concept of corruption perceptions and apply it at the small scale: How could you calculate a corruption perception index for your own organization?
This nifty idea came to my attention from Melanie Shong Helm, an HR consultant in Florida. She commented on my original article about the declining CPI and urged compliance professionals to “take a look internally and ‘measure’ your own index of corruption. What would your employees say? What is the message and culture that you send daily?”
Excellent suggestion. Let’s think about how to do that.
First, let’s remember that the goal is to measure the perception of corruption within your organization. That’s not necessarily the same as actual corruption, although I would argue that over time your actual and perceived levels of corruption will inevitably converge.
Perceptions of corruption, however, can be even more important than actual levels of corruption; because if people perceive your business to be corrupt, that can accelerate decay in your corporate culture. Quite simply, if enough people believe that nobody cares about corruption, then eventually, nobody will.
Hence compiling a corruption perceptions index within your own enterprise can be so useful. It can give you a sense of direction, so that if the culture seems to be headed in a bad direction, you can change course before that rot becomes a self‑fulfilling prophecy.
So, OK. Great idea. How does one do it?
Awareness of Standards and Expectations
If the goal is to measure employees’ perceptions of corruption, then we need to be sure they know what the ethical expectations for your organization actually are. That’s a question of policy awareness.
So (as Helm suggests) you could consider issues like…
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Do employees know what the gifts policy is? Not just the dollar threshold for an unacceptable gift, but also the scenarios where any gift giving at all might be inappropriate?
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Do employees know what your policy is for personal activities permitted on company time? For example, do they know that they’re not allowed to use company time and equipment to shop at online auctions for their Matchbox car collection?
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Do employees know the policy for use of corporate information? Like, most employees will have a sense that trading on company stocks is improper; what about them using their insider knowledge to place bets on predictive markets? Or what about them taking customer lists home to sell those customers ancillary products they make as a side hustle?
We could keep going, with other examples of policy around equipment use, customer data, government contracting, and the like.
The challenge for compliance officers is that most employees do have a sense of what’s right or wrong once they direct their attention to the issue in question. So your policies, messages, and training need to communicate, essentially, “This is the outcome we want or the behavior we expect, because this is the morally bad thing that would happen if you don’t follow our policy.”
That’s the spadework that you, HR, and middle managers need to perform every day before we even get to perceptions of corruption. That needs to be in place so that as employees go about their duties they can see, “Oh, that thing happening over there — that looks like corruption.”
If employees aren’t able to think in those terms, you’ll never get a good sense of how they perceive corruption within your enterprise. They won’t know what they’re looking at.
Measuring Perceptions
The easiest way to assess employees’ perceptions of corruption or misconduct in their enterprise is simply to ask them. Undertake a study of employee attitudes and ask them what they see going on within the business.
You could ask questions such as:
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Do you feel like you’re working within an ethical organization?
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Have you witnessed acts of misconduct or corruption, even if you didn’t report them?
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Have you witnessed acts of retaliation against people who’ve spoken up about misconduct?
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Do you see executives held accountable for misconduct they commit or encourage?
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Do you feel like you have safe, easy ways to report concerns about misconduct or corruption you see?
Two points here about the bullet points above. First, notice the verbs in those questions: see, feel, witness. Those questions are meant to meet employees where they are, and to respect the impressions they have about what’s happening in the business — even if those impressions later turn out to be factually incorrect.
If you want employees to communicate with you about the corporate culture and what they believe is happening, those employees need to feel “heard.” Frame your questions in an open, inviting way to achieve that.
Second, notice the final bullet point, which asks about whether executives are held accountable for misconduct. That matters a lot. Humans are finely tuned to sniff out examples of hypocrisy, which in the corporate world translates to senior executives “getting away with it.” That could be anything from bribing an official to fix a contract, to bringing an affair partner along on company travel, to directing a team leader to hire a friend’s child as a summer intern.
Yes, you should also ask employees whether they see coworkers committing misconduct or corruption too; but that question gets at something different. If employees see lots of misconduct happening among coworkers, that’s more a reflection of your controls and procedures to block misconduct; those things aren’t working well.
If employees see low‑level misconduct among executives, that’s a reflection of tone at the top and ethical priorities; management isn’t serious about those things. An organization could have problems at both levels, but the solutions are different for each one.
That’s enough for today. If you have any feedback on how you measure employee perceptions of corruption and misconduct, or you want to talk about what questions to ask to get a sense of that, drop me a line at [email protected] any time!
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