Nonprofit governance and outside corruption: The role of accountability, stakeholder participation, and management systems

Outside corruption implies that a nonprofit organization is used to commit an infraction or crime. In Spain, this type of corruption has been detected in the context of public nonprofits as a result of the legal reform that enabled the judgment of the criminal responsibility of legal entities. A large percentage of these entities were affected by the reform, but little is known about the possible practices that can altogether prevent this behavior. In particular, there are few studies that consider nonprofit governance as a possible measure to avoid corruption in this context. For this reason, our aim is to analyze the role of certain nonprofit governance practices in fighting corruption. Using structural equation modeling, our results reveal that nonprofit governance is a key tool for mitigating corruption, although the weights of the different practices are not the same.