When Walmart’s chief executive, Michael Duke, appeared at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting in New York this month, a raucous crowd of protesters awaited him. Walmart was confronting reports of bribery in Mexico, a wave of labor demonstrations in the United States and, perhaps most critically, questions about a grisly fire that had killed 112 workers at a Bangladeshi garment factory used by several Walmart suppliers.

“We will not buy from an unsafe factory,” Mr. Duke told the audience. “If a factory is not going to operate with high standards, then we would not purchase from that factory.”

But Mr. Duke’s reassurances that Walmart enforces high standards in the global clothing industry appear to be contradicted by inspection reports it requested and some of Walmart’s own internal communications:

¶ Just two weeks before Mr. Duke’s vow, a top Walmart executive acknowledged in an e-mail to a group of retailers that the industry’s safety monitoring system was seriously flawed. “Fire and electrical safety aspects are not currently adequately covered in ethical sourcing audits,” Rajan Kamalanathan, the executive, wrote to other board members of the Global Social Compliance Program, a business-led group focused on improving the supply chain.

¶ Three inspection reports from 2011 and 2012 at the Tazreen Fashions factory where the fire occurred revealed serious repeated violations, including a lack of fire alarms in many areas, a shortage of fire extinguishers and obstacles blocking workers’ escape routes. At the same time, those inspections did not even cover whether the factory had fire-safe emergency exits, leaving that responsibility to often lax government inspectors.