Three Hints For An Efficient Whistleblowing System

Pavlo Verkhniatsky, Managing Partner and Director at COSA

Pavlo is an expert in sophisticated integrity due diligence with an international component. He leads research on country/political risks in the FSU, CEE and Africa, cross-border investigations and asset tracing, consulting projects on internal investigations and compliance system implementation.

COSA is a corporate intelligence firm providing intelligence solutions for international businesses that care about security, compliance, integrity and business continuity. We built our reputation through our own team of industry and country experts and our solid intelligence gathering methods, which, adapted to local specificities, enable us to access the most valuable data and transform it into actionable information used by multinationals operating in a broad variety of industries.

Whistleblowing often does not work as it should in companies due to such factors as:

1. Employees do not always know what exactly they should report. What is good and what is bad in a corporate world is not obvious to many. So the task of the compliance officer is to gather and structure information on the schemes and violations typical for an exact business and even department and address that in a clear way to the team.
2. Vague application forms that often lead to spamming the compliance function with irrelevant information. On the contrary, a structured whistleblowing template built of obligatory fields that guides the whistleblowers and helps them submit a clear and full report drags away spammers and helps you focus on the big fish.
3. Inefficient approach to investigating claims. A pre-screening procedure mainly based on methods that involve open source intelligence and limited human intelligence can save time and costs while identifying whether the case is worth a full-cycle investigation.

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