Ethics, Fraud and Compliance Services

A well-designed Ethics and Compliance programme not only safeguards your organisation from legal and regulatory risks but will also promotes ethical, transparent and informed decision-making across all levels of your organisation. It is also key to creating a culture of integrity and accountability that strengthens trust and relationships with all your stakeholders.


How we can help you with Ethics and Compliance?

We blend industry and professional services expertise to deliver solutions to your ethics and compliance challenges. Our clients include organisations of all sizes and complexity and across a range of sectors. We operate nationwide with key hubs in London, Birmingham and Manchester, and globally through the BDO International network. 

We will help you to design, implement and embed effective ethics and compliance frameworks. We will give you advice and solutions tailored to your organisation’s maturity and corporate ESG goals.

We have subject matter expertise across a broad range of ethics and compliance risks including bribery and corruption, fraud, modern slavery and human rights, competition, money laundering, trade compliance, failure to prevent the facilitation of tax evasion, whistleblowing, organisational culture and ethical conduct and decision-making.

Our services cover the following areas:

  • Fraud Risk Assessments
  • Fraud Prevention and Detection Controls
  • Fraud Risk Management Frameworks
  • Fraud Risk Policies
  • Fraud Investigations and Remediation Efforts
  • Anti-Fraud Training
  • Monitoring of Fraud Risks and Control Mechanisms

Our compliance maturity assessments will help your organisation understand what good looks like, how mature its ethics and compliance framework is and how to develop it successfully.

Our maturity model and assessment have been informed by our experience, leading practice guidance and regulatory requirements. We use our tried and tested assessment methodology involving desktop review, interviews, surveys and workshops. You will receive a report with recommendations and a roadmap of how to achieve your desired state of maturity. Your compliance risks and requirements, your policy and controls frameworks, your business processes and your ethics and compliance monitoring will all be taken into account.

An activity-driven risk assessment is essential to properly understand your organisation’s key compliance risk exposures and the required controls.

You will benefit from our extensive experience supporting clients across multiple sectors to assess and develop their ethics and compliance frameworks. The risk assessments can cover multiple compliance risk areas or focus on specific risk areas such as responding to various regulatory and legal requirements.

A robust framework, an appropriately resourced and skilled Ethics and Compliance function and a culture of ethical decision-making are all key to effectively managing compliance risks. We build holistic frameworks based on our understanding of your organisations’ unique needs. Our ethics and compliance framework design includes policy and process design, risks and controls design, reporting and record keeping and training and monitoring.Your framework will be built on an understanding of your compliance risks and exposures, clear policies and controls, and processes to detect and investigate non-compliance.

Recent regulatory developments and evolving corporate governance practices have made compliance and operational control mechanisms a clear priority. These developments have introduced new requirements for the establishment of effective risk management and internal control frameworks, while also requiring boards of directors to make statements regarding the effectiveness of these systems.

By helping you understand your organisation’s compliance and operational control environment, we provide assurance that these controls are appropriately designed, properly implemented and fit for purpose.

We also support organisations in raising awareness of risk and control culture across the business and in strengthening internal understanding of these matters. In addition, we assist with the implementation of GRC (Governance, Risk and Compliance) technologies and data analytics solutions to support assurance and reporting processes.

Ongoing compliance monitoring activities not only help ensure that regulatory obligations and internal standards are met, but also contribute to embedding a culture of compliance across the organisation. This approach strengthens organisational resilience by enabling potential issues to be identified and addressed quickly, before they affect operations or damage the organisation’s reputation.

Effective compliance monitoring programmes help identify the common root causes of non-compliance, support remediation efforts, and contribute to the prevention of future compliance failures. By leveraging our global network, we are also able to deliver compliance monitoring services across different locations, with a focus on your highest-risk areas.

Risk culture refers to an organisation’s attitudes and behaviours towards risk management. Risk culture is observed in how both individuals and groups identify, understand, openly discuss, escalate and act on current and emerging risks. We believe a strong ethical and risk culture produces better decision-making and improves business and customer outcomes.


Our services include: 

  • Risk culture assessment,
  • Integration into your Internal Audit programme
  • Behavioural Science expertise in the design and evaluation of risk culture assessment.
  • Root cause analysis of non-compliance findings

The performance of Third parties' can have a significant impact on your organisation's success and reputation as well as the additional risk of failure to demonstrate compliance with key standards and policies.

We will conduct assessments of your suppliers and contractors' internal control frameworks and compliance with a particular focus on bribery and corruption and fraud risks. These assessments are conducted both onsite and remotely, in the local language, to ensure you and your stakeholders can be confident of compliance.

In commercial disputes, clarifying the financial and operational dimensions of disagreements arising from complex commercial relationships is critical in enabling parties to support their positions with objective data. With our experience in contract and transaction analysis, damage quantification, and expert witness services, we address dispute matters through a structured methodology, assess claims on a data-driven basis, and present clear and comprehensible analyses for decision-makers. In this way, as BDO, we support our clients in acting more strongly and prepared in negotiation, mediation, litigation, and arbitration processes. We design our broad range of services, examples of which are provided below, in line with your specific needs:

Expert Support in Commercial Disputes: We support our clients across a broad range of areas in commercial disputes, including conducting fact-finding and due diligence assessments, calculating financial losses and damage claims, and evaluating claims raised by the opposing party. Where needed, we also support parties by acting as mediators between them and by providing expert opinions in local court or arbitration proceedings.

Expert Support in Shareholder Disputes: We analyze the root causes of financial disputes between shareholders, review financial records and transactions from an independent perspective, and provide technical support for damage quantification and valuation studies. We present our outputs in a manner that helps strengthen trust among stakeholders, eliminate uncertainties, and establish clear communication channels.

Assessment of Compliance with Commercial Contracts: In your contract-based commercial relationships, we identify gaps in representation, control, and monitoring processes, as well as the losses incurred as a result of such gaps, and develop roadmaps to address operational deficiencies.