Due to recent bribery scandals and a proliferation of anti-bribery laws, multinational companies are more sensitive to the commercial ethics of their intermediaries. Since 1998, more than thirty new anti-bribery laws have been enacted to implement the OECD Convention to Combat Bribery. The new laws typically state that a business will be liable for the corrupt acts and/or the improper payments made by an intermediary if management “knew or should have known” that a particular intermediary was likely to make an inappropriate payment. Thus, companies are required to conduct sufficient due diligence on prospective intermediaries to ensure that they are committed to ethical business practices regardless of business pressure, local law or custom. Anti-bribery laws, however, are deliberately vague on the issue of “sufficient due diligence.”

TRACE was founded by private-sector anti-bribery practitioners to achieve economies of scale and set a common standard for two shared elements of anti-bribery compliance: due diligence reviews and anti-bribery training for business intermediaries.