Conflict of interest policy: declaring things before they become a problem

A conflict of interest policy sets out what counts as a conflict, how people declare one, and how the organisation handles it once declared. The common misreading is that its purpose is to prevent conflicts. It is not — in a small company, overlapping interests are normal and often unavoidable. Its purpose is to get them written down early, when they are administrative, rather than discovered later, when they look like concealment.

That distinction is the whole thing. A director whose spouse owns a supplier is a fact to record and manage. The same fact surfacing during a dispute, undeclared, is a different problem entirely, and the damage comes from the silence rather than the relationship.

What counts as a conflict of interest

• Financial interest in a supplier, competitor or customer — directly or through family.
• Outside employment, consultancy or a directorship elsewhere.
• Family and close personal relationships within the company, especially where one reports to the other.
• Involvement in hiring, promoting or contracting with someone you have a personal connection to.
• Gifts and hospitality above the threshold your code of conduct sets.
• Public roles that could conflict with a company position.
• Perceived conflicts — situations that would look wrong to a reasonable outsider even where nothing improper occurs.

Perceived conflicts belong in the policy explicitly. People resist declaring them, on the grounds that nothing improper is happening and the declaration implies otherwise. But the reputational damage of an undeclared appearance of conflict is nearly identical to the damage from a real one, and declaring it costs a line in a register.

The register is the mechanism

A conflict of interest policy without a register is a statement of intent. The register is what makes it operate: a list of declarations, each with who declared it, what the interest is, when it was declared, and what was decided — no action needed, recuse from specific decisions, reassign the relationship, or step back from a contract entirely.

The decision column is what most registers omit and what makes them useful later. Recording that an interest was declared, without recording what was done about it, answers half the question a board or an auditor will ask.

Running it

1. Define what must be declared, with examples drawn from your own business rather than generic ones.
2. Ask everyone to declare annually, including a positive nothing to declare — silence is ambiguous.
3. Require declaration within days when something new arises, not at the next annual round.
4. Record each declaration with the decision taken and who took it.
5. Where a conflict touches a specific decision, note the recusal in the minutes of that decision too.
6. Keep the register restricted but reviewable by the people who need it — usually leadership and whoever handles governance.
7. Review at least annually, and always before a significant contract or appointment.
8. Check declarations against reality occasionally: supplier lists and payroll surnames are a cheap sanity check.

Handling one once it is declared

Most declared conflicts need something modest. Recusal from a specific decision is the usual answer: the person takes no part in the discussion, does not vote, and that is minuted. Where a relationship is ongoing — a family member reporting to a relative — the answer is usually structural, moving the reporting line rather than relying on good behaviour.

Procurement deserves its own note, because it is where the money is. If someone with an interest in a bidder participates in the evaluation, the decision is contestable regardless of how it went. Excluding them costs one person on a panel and removes the whole argument.

Where the register lives

Ettex Records suits this shape directly: one row per declaration with fields for the person, the interest, the date, the decision taken and the review date, filterable to what is due for re-declaration and searchable when a supplier name comes up. It sits alongside the other governance registers rather than in a spreadsheet with three versions.

The access question deserves deliberate handling here more than in most registers — declarations contain personal and financial information about identifiable people, and sharing in Ettex is the ordinary workspace model rather than a purpose-built confidential file. Decide explicitly who can see it. There is also no declaration workflow: no annual reminder cycle, no per-person confirmation, no approval routing. Collecting declarations is a task somebody runs; this holds the result.

Declare early, include nil returns, record the decision and not just the interest, and keep anyone with an interest off the panel that awards the contract.