Margarida Smith is the Chief Compliance Officer at Odebrecht Engineering & Construction (OEC) since April 2018. With over 20 years of compliance experience in the financial and agriculture sectors, she shares an analysis of the Ethics Line at OEC.
 
How do you see the Ethics Line channel in OEC’s business scenario and workplace?
To understand the role of the Ethics Line, it is important to understand that compliance is an individual responsibility. OEC’s whistleblowing channel is a tool that helps us to maintain a safe and ethical workplace, is available to everyone and is managed responsibly. Support from a specialized company for a part of the process involving the Ethics Line is a good global practice and helps to impart greater reliability into the management of reporting channels. Since we adopted this work model at OEC, we have observed visible improvement in key indicators.
 
What are the channel’s main results?
Since January 2017, 317 reports were registered and 24% were confirmed, which is above the industry average. This reflects the maturation of the company’s workplace and shows that team members are understanding the channel’s purpose. In terms of disciplinary measures, during the period we had 27 terminations, 13 warnings and 12 training and process-improvement actions.
 
How is this subject handled internally at OEC?
One important factor that contributes to this topic is preserving the company’s culture, which is so strong and recognized by people. It is critical that you observe and respect the corporate model. The Odebrecht Entrepreneurial Technology (TEO) empowers team members to exercise their role in the company’s evolution and to be responsible for their deliveries and ethical relations, which is directly related to the Compliance System. Of course, we also maintain work fronts focused on compliance training and have clear policies and guidelines. But credibility and reliability, both internally and externally, stems mainly from our work and permanent focus on this topic: whether through the attitude and engagement of our leaders and team members, through the perception of improvements to processes or, at its extreme, through the application of disciplinary measures.
 
What is the role of the Compliance department?
To understand the Business and help safeguard its integrity. The company already had an engineering risk assessment process and, in recent years, its operations have focused on anti-corruption aspects. I can say that we have surmounted this phase and, today, our work focuses on supporting the business more naturally and fluidly to contribute to a robust control environment guided by risk management.

“TEO empowers team members to exercise their role in the company’s evolution and to be responsible for their deliveries and ethical relations. That is directly related to the Compliance System.”