Enhancing corporate accountability through covert situational integrity testing (CSIT)

Lord, Nicholas and Levi, Michael ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2131-2882 2024. Enhancing corporate accountability through covert situational integrity testing (CSIT). Griffith Law Review 10.1080/10383441.2024.2439366 Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

This article explores the potential of ‘covert situational integrity testing’ as a mechanism for assessing corporate/organisational compliance with legal rules and standards, the goal being to enhance corporate/organisational accountability. There are major challenges to holding corporations/organisations to account for non-compliance: low detection levels, incomplete understanding of the inner workings of organisations, and the modest power of current social scientific research methodologies. This article argues there is scope for methodological innovation through the use of covert situational integrity testing, a variation of mystery shopping methodologies, to address some of these gaps, with a focus not on service quality or customer satisfaction but on compliance with regulatory and legal requirements, and as a data gathering tool on secretive and difficult to access areas of business operation. We focus on two examples: AML compliance by challenger banks, and the promotion of aggressive tax avoidance schemes. Our core argument is that covert situational integrity testing provides a research mechanism through which robust and systematic observational data can be collected and scrutinised by independent, third-party assessors to understand levels of organisational/corporate compliance with legal rules and standards, and by doing so, identify critical vulnerabilities and strengths in the compliance responses of organisations and industries.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education)
Publisher:	Griffith University, Griffith Law School, Socio-Legal Research Centre
ISSN:	1038-3441
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	5 December 2024
Date of Acceptance:	2 December 2024
Last Modified:	22 Jan 2025 15:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/174520

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