Quality infrastructure supports sustainable growth, improves well-being and generates jobs. Recognising this, quality infrastructure is both an explicit goal and enabler of the 2030 sustainable development agenda.

The member countries of the ADB/OECD Anti-Corruption Initiative for Asia and the Pacific attach high priority to the fight against corruption in public procurement. In July 2004, member countries of the Initiative decided to dedicate the Initiative’s first thematic review to curbing corruption in public procurement.

Integrity Pacts have been used in more than 18 countries worldwide, among others in Argentina, Bulgaria, China, Colombia, Ecuador, Germany, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Italy, Latvia, Mexico, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Rwanda, South Korea and Zambia. They have been implemented at various levels and across numerous sectors.

This paper includes an overview of how an Integrity Pact can be initiated and their benefits. 

Why do companies need Integrity Pacts?

It’s all too common for companies to encounter corruption during public procurement processes. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Foreign Bribery Report states that 57 per cent of foreign bribery cases which it assessed related to public procurement.In the EU alone, corrupt bidding processes have increased annual contract costs by US$5 billion. The effects can be disastrous, including exposing companies to serious risks, such as:

The Banknotes Ethics Initiative (BnEI) is an anti-corruption collective action initiative founded in 2013. It addresses the internal compliance standards of its members combined with a rigorous accreditation process administered by an external accreditation council.

The objectives of BnEI are also supported by 38 central banks, and now, some five years after its inception, the BnEI is picking up on one of its driving themes – ensuring fair competition in the procurement of banknotes.

This handbook seeks to provide hands-on guidance to those contracting authorities and bidders who are willing to act for a more transparent public procurement market by pursuing an integrity pact. Moreover, it is aimed at providing additional information to all those who wish to know more about this anti-corruption tool.

The purpose of this publication – which was written collaboratively in only four days – is to contribute to the already existing literature on Integrity Pacts, but from a civil society perspective. This document is based on the experience of the Transparency International global network.

This Learning Review was the first comprehensive analysis of experiences with Integrity Pact implementation in over 20 countries over two decades.

The main findings confirm that Integrity Pacts:

The Integrity Pact (IP) is a powerful tool developed by Transparency International (TI) to help governments, businesses and civil society fight corruption in public contracting. It consists of a process that includes an agreement between a government or government agency (‘the authority’) and all bidders for a public sector contract, setting out rights and obligations to the effect that neither side will pay, offer, demand or accept bribes; nor will bidders collude with competitors to obtain the contract, or bribe representatives of the authority while carrying it out.