News MonitoringHow to detect potential conflicts of interest – comprehensively, accurately and cost-effectively
One of the most important – and sensitive – aspects of any procurement process is determining whether there are any potential conflicts of interest between vendors and employees.
The reason is simple. If a selected vendor is later discovered to be linked to an employee, this lapse in due diligence could result in anything from a loss of trust in the organisation’s brand to fines, investigations, or more devastating consequences.
But identifying potential conflicts of interest is a complex, multi-layered process that could consume more time and resources than organisations have.
The challenges of conflicts-of-interest (COI) checks
1. Most organisations rely on employees declarations to flag any potential conflicts of interest. However, this means:
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- Deceitful employees may deliberately leave out information during declarations
- Other employees may unknowingly miss declaring important information
- Previously declared information could be outdated by the time a conflict-of-interest check is performed – leading to missed connections
2. To perform conflicts-of-interest checks, organisations need to manually:
- Access the details of all their employees
- Look through a complete list of vendors that the company works (or intends to work) with
- Comb through every detail to spot links between employees and vendors
This results in high costs from purchasing multiple profile reports from a corporate registry, as well as significant manpower costs.
3. To reduce (but not eliminate) risks, organisations often use sampling, which involves:
- Taking a random sample of employees
- Choosing a random sample of vendors
- Performing conflicts-of-interest checks on these samples
This stop-gap method produces results that are not comprehensive enough to be considered as effective due diligence – which can be problematic should a conflict of interest be found by authorities.
The solution: An expert team that uncovers deep connections between vendors and employees for you
Handshakes Xpert is a done-for-you service that sees our expert team take over your conflicts-of-interest checks. We will dive deep into the connections between your vendors and employees, and highlight potential issues to you.
What makes Handshakes Xpert more efficient and cost-effective than in-house efforts?
Our technology can run comprehensive checks of every employee and vendor
Leveraging on our access to official company registry data, our proprietary mapping technology can run checks and report if any of your employees and vendors are connected – transforming a previously time-intensive and error-prone task into a fast, accurate and reliable process.
Our investigations go deep, finding connections you didn’t know existed
With our analytics capabilities and corporate registry database, we are able to uncover hidden connections – even connections that go several levels deep.
Our alerts ensure that you’ll never be caught off guard
Changes in employee or vendor information can result in new potential conflicts of interest that didn’t previously exist. Our system can send you alerts whenever new changes result in potential conflicts of interest – so you’ll always stay on top of developments.
The Handshakes difference
Proprietary data analytics technology
Handshakes is the only ACRA data reseller with advanced graph analytics tools which allow us to uncover & visualise deeper connections between entities and persons of interest quicker.
Long-tail monitoring alerts
Annual checks can be time-consuming and costly. We can optimise your investment by setting up custom alerts to inform you of situations that could potentially result in a conflict of interest between an employee and vendor – enhancing your long-tail monitoring capabilities, affordably.
Done-for-you or do-it-yourself (DIY), you choose
Handshakes provides you the option of having our team of experts run comprehensive bulk checks for you, or performing DIY batch procurement checks using our Handshakes App. You choose the solution that works for you, we’ll provide the technology and expertise.