Alejandra Vargas, a lecturer in Criminal Law and Compliance at UIC and coordinator of the Postgraduate Programme in Compliance and Cybersecurity, spoke at the World Compliance and Anti-Corruption Congress, organised by the World Compliance Association (WCA) to mark its tenth anniversary. The event took place on 23 and 24 September at the Lima Chamber of Commerce in Peru.

The congress brought together more than 500 participants from over 20 countries, as well as international experts, representatives of public bodies and professionals specialising in compliance, integrity and anti-corruption.

Alejandra Vargas participated in the panel discussion "Public compliance: from regulatory formality to effective integrity", alongside Nelson Shack Yalta, former comptroller general of the Republic of Peru, and Paco Moncayo Gallegos, former mayor of Quito, in a session moderated by Santiago Solines Moreno, president of the Ecuador Chapter of the World Compliance Association.

The panel examined one of the key challenges currently facing anti-corruption policies: how to ensure that the existence of regulations, codes of ethics, anti-fraud plans and whistleblowing channels translates into a genuine culture of integrity within public administrations.

From a European and Spanish perspective, Vargas examined the evolution of corruption prevention models towards systems based on the management of integrity risks, rather than merely reacting to irregularities after they have occurred. In this regard, she highlighted the need to identify the areas of greatest risk, embed controls into routine public decision-making processes and assess whether these mechanisms bring about real changes in the way institutions operate.

"The real change lies in moving from managing breaches to managing integrity risks," Vargas said during the session.

Another key theme of the discussion was the risk of the so-called tick-box compliance: systems that are formally complete, with manuals, protocols and training in place, but which have no effective impact on organisational behaviour. In this context, Vargas argued for the development of indicators that measure outcomes rather than simply tracking activities, examining, for example, whether the detection of a conflict of interest has changed a decision, whether an alert has enabled a procedure to be corrected, or whether a detected irregularity has led to a review of the controls that had failed.

The protection of whistleblowers was also one of the central issues discussed during the session. Drawing on the experience of the European Union and Spanish legislation, the UIC lecturer stressed that an effective whistleblowing channel cannot be limited to technological infrastructure but must also provide confidentiality, independence in its management, effective protection against retaliation and an appropriate response for whistleblowers.

Vargas’s participation in this international congress reinforces the UIC Faculty of Law's presence in academic and professional debates on emerging models of compliance and public integrity, at a time when corruption prevention is shifting away from a focus on formal compliance towards approaches centred on risk management and effective controls.