Our commitment
At BDO, we pride ourselves on building strong relationships with our people, our clients and our suppliers. This is reinforced by our organisational values – One, Bold, Human, Strive and Heart – which shape our internal culture and inform how we interact with local communities.
We firmly believe that through fostering lasting relationships, we are better equipped to promote a workplace that is ethical and free of human rights abuses.
BDO is committed to:
- Operating its business in accordance with the Modern Slavery Act 2018 (Cth), including all emerging amendments to this legislation
- Ensuring our people understand modern slavery and the risk it presents to our operations
- Providing our people with appropriate avenues for reporting potential instances of modern slavery within our operations, or the operations of our suppliers and/or clients
- Mitigating modern slavery risk within our operations
- Eliminating potential and/or actual modern slavery practices from our operations and supply chain
- Utilising the due diligence completed to date to facilitate effective action plans and ‘next steps’ in the pursuit of modern slavery risk mitigation and elimination using a proactive approach
- Ensuring appropriate transparency with our people, clients, suppliers and stakeholders regarding the refinement of our modern slavery due diligence process and the findings arising from this
- Enhancing our data insights to better measure the effectiveness of our existing modern slavery risk framework.
The actions taken to further mature our response to modern slavery risk management in the 2023 Modern Slavery Statement include, but are not limited to:
- Upgrading our systems on a large scale as part of Project Elephant. As a multi-year initiative that started in 2023, Project Elephant is designed to equip our people with the advanced systems they need to become future-ready advisers and deliver exceptional client service both internally and externally. Key IT platforms to be implemented include:
- Human Resources Information System (HRIS)
- Finance
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM), including client onboarding functions
- Practice Management
- Document Management.
- Reducing the threshold applied to suppliers during pre-due diligence in order to broaden the scope of our due diligence as a whole. Those suppliers captured within scope are considered material and underwent expanded due diligence through the EthiXbase platform
- Pre-emptive modern slavery-related due diligence through the EthiXbase platform of all People & Culture contractors
- Launched our updated Whistleblowing Policy to ensure continued compliance with applicable regulations, and streamline the investigation process through efficient role delegation Utilised the revised National Complaints Framework, launched in 2023, to support our mandatory reporting actions to the Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA) in line with applicable regulations (February and August 2024)
- Updated, reviewed and launched several policies and procedures.
BDO’s 2024 Modern Slavery Statement addresses the mandatory criteria outlined in the Modern Slavery Act 2018 (Cth).
Should you require further information outside of what is disclosed in our Modern Slavery Statement, please contact QualityManagement@bdo.com.au.