BKMS^® Incident Reporting Essentials

Internal reporting channels offer valuable advantages to employees and employers alike. They can have a long-term effect on your company culture and success.

Advantages for your employees include:

• Increased trust in your company
• In the case of digital whistleblower systems: Protection of anonymity

Advantages for your business include:

• Detect and deal with risks of any kind early on
• Minimise reputational damage by dealing with problems internally rather than exposing yourself to the public and the authorities
• Avoid fines and sanctions
• Meet legal requirements for the protection of reporters – these include Sapin II in France, the UK Bribery Act and the EU Whistleblower Protection Directive, which must be enshrined in national law in all EU member states.

Companies’ ‘concern’ that the option of anonymity could increase abuse of whistleblower systems is unfounded, according to the data: 66% of respondents have received fewer than 2% of reports that were in any way inappropriate, and for a total of 84% of companies, this figure was still under 5 %.

The security of the obtained information is the greatest priority of our system. We work with an encryption PIN to ensure that no employees or third parties can use the system and access data.

Only report examiners who have the encryption PIN can decrypt and access confidential data.

Our benchmarking studies have shown that the adoption of whistleblower systems and, as such, the number of reports submitted is on the increase. This does not lead to a deluge of reports, however. 

The protection of whistleblower is governed in very different ways across EU member states. In France, for instance, companies have been obliged to operate a compliance programme including a whistleblower system since June 2017. In many other countries, however, the situation is different: people reporting incidents may face repercussions such as the loss of their workplace or civil and criminal persecution.

Germany does not offer legal protection for reporters yet. But the new EU directive will change that: the German government has until 2021 to enshrine the new EU directive in national law.

A case manager is a person who receives and processes reports from whistleblower, reviews and initiates suitable steps, and documents the entire process. The EU Whistleblower Protection Directive stipulates that case managers must be qualified and aware of data protection regulations.

The following people may be case managers:

• Employees from compliance, HR, legal or ethics departments
• Data protection officers
• CFOs
• Auditors
• A member of the executive board

To support effective work across departments and countries, the following languages are available to case managers: German, English, Spanish, French, Polish.

The reporting process consists of 3 steps:

1. Selecting the category (e.g. bribery, grievances within the company, breaches of rules, etc.)
2. Describing the situation/incident and, if applicable, uploading supporting files. 
3. Afterwards, the whistleblower can set up a secured postbox to enable protected dialogue with the case manager.

The EU member states have until December 2021 to implement the EU directive in national law.

By 2021 at the latest, companies with more than 250 employees must have implemented internal reporting channels. Companies with between 50 and 250 employees will be legally obliged to implement internal reporting channels by 2023 at the latest.

However, as Member States may adopt laws before the transposition deadline, companies should start with the implementation early.