Business Ethitch

The Ethisphere Institute for the last eight years it has put out a list it labels the “World's Most Ethical Companies.” There are 144 winners. he list is unranked and includes such disparate companies as Ford Motor F +0.8% , Aflac AFL +1% , Kellogg K +1.02% and Google GOOG +1.16% in the US, a Saudi hospital construction company called IHCC, PKN Orlen , a Polish oil refiner and All Good Organics, a food company in New Zealand.

To earn a spot on the list, explains Ethisphere's general counsel Michael Byrne, companies must have robust corporate compliance programs, strong corporate social responsibility policies, they need to comply with federal sentencing guidelines, they should be abiding by international labor, anti-trust and trade laws and they should be monitoring their supply chain to make sure that companies they contract with are also sticking to international law and labor standards. Ethisphere nixes companies that have legal charges pending and it won't consider firms that deal in alcohol, tobacco or firearms.

Some 600 companies nominated themselves and filled out a questionnaire with more than 100 items.

A couple of sample questions: “Has your organization assigned responsibility for the primary oversight of risk management within the organization to a specific member of the Board, a Committee or other governing authority?” and “How often does the person responsible for risk management in your organization formally communicate with the Board of Directors or other governing authority?” Companies get a raw score based on their answers to the survey questions. Then members of Ethisphere's 16-person staff do what Byrne calls “due diligence,” scrutinizing documents the companies supply and putting each company through a Thomson Reuters database that tracks lawsuits and other corporate activity.

How does Ethisphere evaluate a food producer in New Zealand, a construction firm in Saudi Arabia and an oil company in Poland? Byrne says his staff does its best to...