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Karin Henriksson
Founding Partner and Senior Advisor

During the last year, whistleblowers were frequently featured in international media. News agencies covered exposures of wrongdoings, such as the Panama Papers, #metoo and LuxLeaks. There is an increasing recognition of the value of whistleblowing as a means of addressing misconduct. Also, a growing number of countries are putting legislation in place aimed at protecting whistleblowers. For example, the European Commission proposed a new law this year to strengthen whistleblower protection across the EU. WhistleB, a whistleblowing and compliance organization based in Sweden, conducted a customer study this past August. This article summarizes the main findings of questions that were sent to 200 companies, authorities and other organizations using whistleblowing systems. Most of these organizations are headquartered in Europe, but many are international. Here are some of the findings from our study:

Outlook: the way is up for whistleblowing
The customer study points out that no evidence was found to support the concern that offering an accessible whistleblowing channel would lead to receiving a lot of spam, irrelevant messages, reports made in bad faith or other negative reactions from employees. The organizations surveyed indicated that most of all whistleblower reports received led to investigations, and some remarked that the information obtained through whistleblowing channels would be very hard, if not impossible, to receive in other ways.

In light of the developments in the field of compliance, both on a legal and ethical level, these findings indicate that organizational whistleblowing is not a trend, but the new standard that is here to stay.