Compliance management certification

Best practice to prevent crime, reduce risk, and promote an ethical, law-abiding business culture.

This standard establishes the requirements of a management system to:

• Prevent criminal acts that may be committed by legal entities and that give rise to criminal liability.
• Promoting a culture of prevention and compliance in the organisation.
• Establishing suitable surveillance and control measures to prevent crime and significantly reduce the risk of crimes being committed.
• Facilitating the supervision and control by the body or person in charge of monitoring the functioning and observance of the prevention model.
• Improving management, helping to reduce the risk of criminality and providing a more solid guarantee of security and confidence to government bodies, shareholders and investors, among other interest groups.

Organic Law 1/2015 for the reform of the Penal Code considers crime prevention models as possible factors of exoneration and mitigation of the criminal liability of a legal person, as long as they fulfil a series of requirements.

This technical specification takes into account the provisions of Act 1/2015 with respect to the requirements for models of crime prevention and complements them with the international best practices established in the area of social responsibility, compliance and risk management.

In addition it establishes the obligation of carrying out a periodic verification of the crime prevention model as one of the requirements for exempting a legal person from criminal liability.

The external certification audit of the crime prevention model carried out by an independent, expert, prestigious third party such as AENOR is one of the most reliable, efficient and transparent ways of meeting these requirements and demonstrating an organisation's explicit public commitment.