88 people on Douyin violated the integrity red line, and the anti-fraud actions of major Internet companies continue
2024-08-15
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Recently, Douyin Group released the "Douyin Group Anti-Fraud Notice in the First Half of 2024" (hereinafter referred to as the "Notice"). In the first half of 2024, Douyin Group investigated and dealt with 125 fraud-related violations, of which 88 people were dismissed for violating the integrity red line, and 17 people were transferred to judicial authorities for suspected crimes.
The content of the "Notice" includes commercial bribery, fraud or occupational embezzlement. It was disclosed that former e-commerce employees Li, Zhu and Xu used their positions to seek improper benefits for external talents or service providers and accepted bribes. Their behavior violated the employee code of conduct, and the group has dismissed the three people. At the same time, the three people are suspected of illegal crimes and have been transferred to the public security organs for handling.
In addition, former Douyin employees Lu and Cheng (who had resigned before the incident) took advantage of their positions to accept benefits from external partners. Former Life Service employee Gao took advantage of his position to illegally introduce service providers and accepted benefits. Former Life Service employees Meng, Hou, Shan, Liu, Chang, Wu, and Yu took advantage of their positions to provide improper assistance to external businesses and illegally appropriated the group's assets. Former Product Development and Engineering Architecture employee Cao took advantage of his position to join forces with external personnel to seek personal gain.
The earliest anti-corruption actions of Internet giants can be traced back to 2009, when Alibaba established an anti-corruption department. While the Internet business model brings economic benefits, it also nourishes the soil for corruption. The "Anti-Corruption Blue Book: China's Anti-Corruption and Integrity Building Report No. 8" released by the China Anti-Corruption Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the China Social Sciences Press shows that large-scale private Internet companies have become an important force in my country's anti-corruption camp. With the continuous expansion of the business territory of Internet companies, technological innovation has made the business of companies change with each passing day, and the corruption risks faced by companies have become more diversified and complicated. Corruption has become one of the biggest threats to the normal business management order of companies.
Over the past decade, Internet giants have also increased their investment in anti-corruption. In 2009, in addition to Alibaba's Integrity Department, JD.com established a Supervision Department. In 2011, Baidu established a Professional Ethics Committee. In August 2012, Baidu reported four cases internally, involving individual employees in three departments, namely the Community Search Department, the Public Affairs Department, and the Knowledge Search Product Marketing Department, who privately colluded with external personnel to charge for deleting posts.
2019 was an intensive period of anti-corruption efforts by major Internet companies, with companies reporting corruption including Meituan, 360, Xiaomi, Baidu, Didi, Tencent, etc. In December 2022, Tencent held an internal staff meeting, where Ma Huateng, chairman and CEO of Tencent, said that the corruption problem within the Tencent Group was "really shocking," and that many businesses could not be done, not because of problems with managers or business directions, but because corruption loopholes were too large and businesses were hollowed out.
On July 25, 2024, the Beijing Municipal Procuratorate held a briefing on the work of combating and managing commercial corruption crimes in Internet companies, directly targeting high-incidence areas of Internet corruption and high-frequency problems in the e-commerce field. Specifically, it includes severely punishing commercial corruption crimes in accordance with the law, enabling digital prosecution to "investigate multiple cases in one case", helping Internet companies to build integrity, and actively carrying out legal publicity against commercial corruption.
Jiang Xianliang, senior partner of Beijing Yinghe Law Firm and director of Zhonghe Compliance Research Institute, said that from the summary and reflection of the internal problems of the Internet platform company leaders, it can be seen that the outstanding problems in the company's governance are no longer limited to the severity of individual corruption cases and specific corruption behaviors, but have risen to the analysis of the causes of internal corruption in the company and the deep-level governance issues such as the company's strategic execution. To fundamentally solve this problem, first, we need to rely on an effectively operating compliance system, and second, rely on a compliance culture of honest practice, so that various systems can be effectively implemented.
(This article comes from China Business Network)
