Secure your internal whistleblowing system

This system allows any whistleblower acting in good faith and without financial compensation to send a report in the event of suspicion of a crime or offence, violation of the law or threat or serious harm to the public interest.

This will most often be an employee, but a third party (supplier, customer, shareholder) can also be a whistleblower.

Disclosure of the name of the whistleblower (or persons involved) or retaliation against him or her exposes the company to criminal sanctions.

It should be noted that a whistleblower in bad faith is exposed to sanctions, including criminal sanctions (slanderous denunciation).

Thus, in the event of an apparently well-founded report, the company may initiate an internal investigation to confirm the facts revealed by the whistleblower and, if necessary, remedy them, including by setting up or strengthening compliance mechanisms to prevent and detect reprehensible facts.

Conversely, the lack of an adequate internal system that reassures employees and third parties can encourage a whistleblower to refer the matter to an administrative or judicial authority or the Defender of Rights, or even a media outlet. This can create a much more complicated situation for the company to manage, forced to defend itself publicly and/or before an external authority instead of being able to deal with the reason for the alert in advance and in a confidential manner.

Feedback since the adoption of the Waserman law shows that the absence of an effective whistleblowing system makes companies vulnerable due to the asymmetry of information between the whistleblower who has chosen to refer the matter to an administrative or judicial authority and the company, which may also be suspected of not having knowingly set up an internal whistleblowing system.