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. This includes maintaining a zero-tolerance stance on modern slavery in any form and embedding responsibility into everything we do.
BDO is committed to:
- Operating in full alignment with the Modern Slavery Act 2018 (Cth), including staying ahead of and integrating all amendments to this legislation
- Ensuring our people are equipped, through education and learning, to recognise modern slavery risks and the potential impact they may have on our operations and communities
- Providing our people with clear, accessible and trusted channels for reporting potential instances of modern slavery within our operations, or the operations of our suppliers and/or our clients
- Embedding robust processes to proactively identify and mitigate modern slavery risk within our operations
- Taking deliberate and sustained action to remove potential and/or actual modern slavery practices from our operations and supply chain
- Using the due diligence completed to date to implement 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 ongoing refinement of our modern slavery due diligence processes 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 progress our response to modern slavery risk management in the 2025 Modern Slavery Statement include, but are not limited to:
- The large-scale upgrading of our systems as part of Project Elephant. As a multi-year initiative that started in 2023, this project 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 to broaden the scope of our due diligence processes as a whole. Those suppliers captured within scope were considered material and underwent expanded due diligence through the EthiXbase platform
- Extending proactive modern-slavery-related due diligence through the EthiXbase platform to all People & Culture and IT contractors
- Commencing development of our Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Program, a large-scale initiative designed to ensure we are compliant with the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Amendment Bill 2024 and associated regulatory requirements
- Embedding our new contractor onboarding processes, which mark a noticeable shift from reactive to proactive due diligence
- Updating, reviewing and launching several policies and procedures.
BDO’s 2025 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.