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Distinguished guests,
Friends all,
A very warm welcome to this 2025 OECD Global Anti-Corruption and Integrity Forum.
This Forum recognises that tackling corruption is a shared interest and responsibility of governments, businesses and civil society, and provides a platform for all stakeholders to share best practices and better coordinate their efforts.
All the participants here today recognise that tackling corruption and promoting integrity delivers far-reaching benefits:
Fostering trust in public institutions,
Ensuring sound government decision-making and the most effective use of public funds,
Providing a level playing field and policy certainty to help businesses grow and economies prosper.
For example, governments with lower perceived corruption levels collect the equivalent of 4% of GDP in additional taxes on average — resources that can go towards investments in growth and wellbeing.
This 26th edition of the Forum will focus in particular on how innovation can allow us to step up our efforts to protect integrity and transparency.
First, on leveraging digital tools to increase the scale and effectiveness of anti-corruption efforts.
From enhancing transparency in public procurement processes, to detecting tax evasion, to supporting conflict of interest investigations, advanced algorithms and new digital technologies are reshaping how public institutions detect and prevent fraud and corruption.
For example, the OECD is currently working with Lithuania’s Special Investigation Services to build a model to detect corruption risks in the use of national and EU funds using AI.
We have also begun a joint project with Austria’s Regional Courts of Audit to integrate AI in public auditing processes, ultimately accelerating and improving the accuracy of document analysis.
The next two days will be an opportunity to share lessons learned so far from these, and other digital tools.
Second, developing innovative partnerships with the private sector as key partners in anticorruption efforts.
Through the Galvanizing the Private Sector Initiative, the OECD connects practitioners from governments and state-owned enterprises with peers from the private sector to identify opportunities to improve the design of public anticorruption and integrity policies and their enforcement.
More broadly, governments need to ensure businesses are incentivised and supported in tackling corruption, including resisting solicitation and reporting bribery attempts.
Currently, 18 OECD members have strategies to mitigate corruption risks in the private sector, state-owned enterprises, and public-private partnerships, which include strengthening compliance and reporting procedures.
And the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, which is now in its 26th year, provides guidance to its members on reinforcing their legal protections for companies that refuse to pay bribes.
This Forum will discuss opportunities to take these efforts forward.
Third, adopting new tools to enhance transparency and ensure integrity of financial flows in jurisdictions with limited information and high-risk perceptions.
Digital payment technologies and blockchain solutions can improve fund traceability and financial institutions’ compliance efforts, ultimately reducing the risk that these institutions will cease operating in jurisdictions perceived to be high risk – which are also jurisdictions where there is a pressing need to increase access to financial services.
Kenya’s M-Pesa, a mobile-based payment service targeting unbanked citizens, and Thailand’s digital ID system, which aims to enhance the security of online payments through ID verification, are some examples of solutions that governments are putting in place to improve the transparency of financial transactions.
The OECD, in consultation with the Financial Action Task Force, FATF, is developing guidance on effectively leveraging these tools to foster and integrity in domestic and cross-border financial flows.
This Forum will be an opportunity to hear from international financial institutions, development co-operation experts and governments on how to further reduce risk perceptions and enable wider access to safe and affordable financial services.
Fourth, addressing evolving forms of undue foreign influence in democratic institutions.
This includes addressing weaknesses in lobbying regulations, political finance laws, and information integrity threats such as AI-generated fake content.
These forms of undue influence can undermine trust in government decision-making.
According to the 2023 OECD Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions, 43% of respondents believed that governments could implement policies favouring corporations at the expense of the public interest.
Our analysis shows significant opportunities to strengthen protections against undue influence, in line with the OECD Recommendation on Transparency and Integrity in Lobbying and Influence.
Out of the 42 jurisdictions for which we have information, only Canada and the EU require lobbyists to declare their awareness-raising and social media campaigns, an increasingly common way of influencing public opinion on policy issues.
Your discussions on strategic corruption will help identify emerging threats and identify necessary updates to national integrity frameworks to safeguard national interests.
On Thursday, we will also be announcing the winners of the 2024 Anti-Corruption Research Challenge.
The challenge, which we launched last year, engaged researchers, students, and practitioners to produce innovative visualisations and actionable insights on new ways of combatting corruption using the OECD Public Integrity Indicators database.
Thank you to all the participants for their contributions to strengthening anti-corruption and integrity policies across the OECD and beyond, and congratulations to the winners.
In closing,
As new forms of undue influence, fraud and corruption emerge, we need innovative solutions to safeguard integrity, and ultimately the efficiency and effectiveness of our governments and markets.
Strengthening co-operation between governments and engaging the civil society, the private sector and academia will be critical to the success of these efforts.
The perspectives that you will share over the next two days will help shape the OECD’s guidance on transparency and anticorruption, and ultimately help foster a more fair and prosperous future.
Thank you.
Working with over 100 countries, the OECD is a global policy forum that promotes policies to preserve individual liberty and improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world.