Public Owned Enterprises in Italy: a hybrid nature for a hybrid regime of over compliance

The purpose of this paper is to describe the state of play regarding Italian government strategy for preventing and combating corruption in Public Owned Enterprises (POEs), that is a special case since it implies the application of a hybrid regime of (over) compliance. On one hand, POEs must comply with Legislative Decree 231 of 2001 as private organization, on the other and POEs must comply with Law 190 of 2012 as public-owned organization. We carried out empirical research on the application of Legislative Decree 231 and Law 190 based on an analysis of 106 Italian Public owned enterprises (POEs). The results depict a controversial situation. Only a small part of the sample seems to comply with the Law and the Decree. Most part of the sample don’t perfectly comply with Decree 231 and at the same time they don’t’ perfectly comply with Law 190. In this case, it seems that the hybrid nature of POEs leads to an incomplete process of compliance. Or said in other terms, over-compliance doesn’t work. The research limitations are mainly related to the sample, only Italian POEs, and to the absence of a longitudinal analysis due to the too recent application of the normative.
This study provides an empirical basis for governments to apply anticorruption measures to POEs, and it provides useful insights for management to avoid the “conformity trap”.
This study is the first to provide a starting point for reflection on the intertwined relationship between POEs and anticorruption measures, and to outline the current status quo of application in the Italian context.