The standard establishes requirements and provides guidance on establishing, implementing, maintaining and improving an anti-bribery management system within an organization. The system proposed by the standard can be implemented by an organization as a separate management element or as part of a company's overall management system.

ISO 37001 deals only with anti-bribery issues and does not address other illegal acts of corruption, addressing topics such as:

• Bribery in the public, private and non-profit sectors;
• bribery by an organization;
• Bribery by employees of an organization acting on its behalf or for its benefit;
• bribery by an organization's business partners acting on its behalf or for its benefit;
• bribery of the organization;
• Bribery of employees of the organization in connection with the activities of the organization;
• bribery of the organization's business partners in connection with the activities of the organization;
• direct and indirect bribery.

The standard consists of two parts: the main part, which includes a detailed description of the rules and requirements for the management system, and the annex, which provides instructions for the implementation and use of the standard. In this case, the main part contains, including:

• key terms and definitions;
• key features of organizations that should be taken into account when implementing anti-corruption management;
• requirements for the distribution of roles in the anti-bribery system within the organization, including the participation of its management and compliance units;
• requirements for the organization's infrastructure and resources, including personnel, communications and documentation, which are necessary for the successful implementation of anti-corruption mechanisms;
• recommendations on the operational functioning and control of the anti-corruption system, including due diligence procedures, financial and non-financial mechanisms for preventing bribery, procedures for investigating bribery cases and ensuring the operation of channels for reporting corruption;
• mechanisms for assessing the effectiveness of the anti-corruption management system in the organization.

The new standard takes into account the best international practices of anti-corruption compliance: the project committee for its preparation included experts from 37 participating countries, 22 observer countries and 8 intermediary organizations, and the British national standard BS 10500 was used as a basis for its development.

The standards contained in ISO 37001 are of a general nature and can be applied by organizations regardless of their type, size, field of activity or national jurisdiction.

In addition, the document is one of the management system standards and has a structure similar to the existing standards of this type used by organizations (for example, ISO 9001 Quality Management and ISO 31000 Risk Management). Formulated in the form of a set of requirements, the norms of the standard allow assessing the compliance of an organization's anti-corruption management system with them, and also simplify the procedure for assessing the company's counterparties by providing an opportunity to take into account the availability of the relevant certificate.