On Wednesday, December 7, the Anti-Corruption Office (OA) and the Argentinian-Canadian Chamber of Commerce held a training to discuss the RITE platform, the experience of pioneering companies and what is to come in RITE II .

The opening and moderation of the meeting was entrusted to Natalia Hopkins, CSR Corporate Social Responsibility Manager of Pesquera SA.

At the start of the presentations, Luis Villanueva, the OA’s Undersecretary for Transparency Policy Planning, said that RITE “It is a public policy of the national government, piloted by the OA with funding from the IDB and the UNDP, but it is an initiative that promotes a tool co-constructed, designed and discussed with different actors in society. official explained: “This initial proposal two years ago, has changed a lot from these meetings, with more than 200 meetings, working tables where forms and regulations were developed, the whole platform was designed like that.”

“The RITE is voluntary, but there will be instances of contractors, which may be public, that require the integration of an integrity program and that this occurs within the RITE. For certain types of contracts, the law requires a program, the demonstration of this today is done by an affidavit, at some point it will happen that they indicate having the registration at the RITE as a means of accrediting it, “explained Villanueva. And to conclude, he said that “regulatory bodies such as SENASA, have issued a resolution where he establishes that in order to have some type of connection with the regulatory body, they will require that they be registered with the RITE, hence the importance of being able to visit the platform now”.

Then, Raúl Saccani, consultant for the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and UNDP Argentina, gave details of the platform and walked through the simulation portal which is available for those who want to inquire about the Registry. In this context, Saccani specifies that “it is a project that was built over months of work with more than 80 professionals who took part in these meetings. The issues that arise today have been the subject of hours of debate and discussion, so there is quite a broad consensus on what the path to building an integrity program looks like. This register is useful even for companies or entities that have not developed anything and who will find the expectations regarding the design of a program”.

One of the registry’s key steps, said the IDB consultant, is the classification of the company or entity that will initiate the process: “Integrity programs are, as required by the regulations of our countries, designed to suit each organization, recognizing this challenge of capacity and economic dimension, the file is oriented towards three levels of progress and the questions that will be included in each level will depend on the type of organization and the activity of the company, such as objective parameters that flow from CEPYME resolution 23”. Saccani pointed out that the RITE: “complements the due diligence efforts undertaken by companies, it can be part of all this information that one collects during the assessment of the advisability of doing business with such and such a supplier. This is an advantage, in terms of being able to facilitate this exchange of information.

Later, Sergio Paez, Head of Business Ethics and Compliance at Novo Nordisk, shared his experience as a pioneer in the Integrity Register for Companies and Entities. “The truth is that at first we were suspicious of the project, and later we saw that the comments that were made by the different chambers in the work tables, and from these discussions on the implementation process of the platform, we started to realize that the contributions were being taken into account and that was generating greater confidence in us,” says Paez, which influenced the decision to enter as pioneering company, specifies the referent of Novo, “it is the fact of projecting oneself on the long term, it is a long-term public policy”. “As a collective action, it is good to enter, to show, to be transparent in the compliance programs that each company has, and also for a company that does not have a great maturity in the programs, this serves as a guide because the questions help you understand if what you are doing is sufficient or not, whether you need to improve it or whether you z change,” he explained.

Finally, regarding the second phase of the RITE, Sergio Paez mentioned that “the human rights part falls under compliance areas, before it did not have as much visibility. Today it is becoming more relevant within our areas, in the case of Novo two years ago we started to manage it, but beyond that it is good that we have the possibility to do the exercise. For us, the implementation of the human rights policy has been a challenge, a learning opportunity”.

Next, Natalia Torres, National Director of Public Ethics for the OA, elaborated on the second part of the RITE: “It was something that happened while we were doing the first phase, but happened also related to the discussions that we had within the Office in relation to how to think about the integrity that we gave ourselves at the beginning of the management. We reconsidered what we meant by integrity and corruption”. In this sense, Torres stated that “from this deconstruction, we think of integrity as a broader one that is not reduced to the traditional anti-corruption agenda but must incorporate a perspective of human rights, protection environment, gender. This led us to think transversally about how to integrate this perspective into different policies such as the Public Integrity and Ethics Bill, which has this perspective; also in the National Integrity Strategy; and of course it is in the RITE that we set out to incorporate this perspective by considering the concept of human rights due diligence”.

Natalia Torres explained that RITE II two will have three modules: gender, human rights and environment: “each has its specific complexities and communities, so we have divided them to generate interactions with experts who could make a contribution to this subject.” This policy was part of the commitment to “enduring integrity”, as the OA official said, “convinced of this need to work on human rights, where clearly the State is the last guarantor of the promotion and exercise of human rights in its territory, but no one can deny the role that companies play so that this does not happen in these spaces. It is therefore necessary to interact in order to be able to promote how to make a policy from this perspective in the business world”.