From December 2021, new legislation on strengthened protection for whistleblowers applies in all EU countries, which affects all employers with at least 50 employees. Despite this many, especially smaller, organizations still lack an approved whistleblower system.
A major reason for this is that most people experience the requirement as another fairly large expense item for something that in practice has little significance for their daily operations.
An image that is reinforced by the heavily marketed expensive “whistleblower systems” which in practice are just modified standard case management systems with some enhanced security. Which is also gladly brought forward by law firms as their services are included as part of these solutions.
But the reality is that the absolute majority of organizations actually manage with much simpler (and much cheaper) solutions.
What the EU directive and legislation require is that there is an internal process for handling reports of irregularities in the organization and at least one secure reporting channel. Both the process and the reporting channel must also protect the integrity of the person using the channel. And the person reporting must have the opportunity to remain anonymous if they so wish.
In fact, many of the expensive specialized systems do not meet these requirements well, especially when it comes to privacy. The main weakness is that they are cloud services and thus vulnerable to intrusions, even internal ones.
Many whistleblower systems also require that the person reporting must first create an account in the system. Which, in addition to the privacy vulnerability, is perceived very negatively and directly counters the purpose of whistleblowing.
After discussions in 2019-2020 with several of our customers, we found that the vast majority of organizations already have an internal process for handling reported irregularities and that what was really missing was a secure reporting channel. And so the project was born that then landed in the company Anonform Ab (ANON::form).
ANON::form is a service that offers extremely secure and fully anonymized web forms that can also be used as a simple approved whistleblower channel, something more and more people are discovering and using.
If your organization is covered by the legal requirement but still does not have an approved whistleblower solution or finds the current solution too expensive and/or complicated; select ANON::form as the reporting channel.
We are happy to help with the practical, from integration support to internal processes, contact us here.
Read more:
Whistleblowers protection
Whistleblower; your optimal guide to the EU directive
How to create a simple and cheap whistleblower solution
