Exposing corruption: protection for the whistleblower

You consider yourself an honest person. You do your job well and you are loyal to your employer. One day you realise that one of your colleagues – perhaps your boss - does not share your ethical approach and is siphoning off considerable sums of money into his or her own pockets. What do you do?

The answer probably depends not just on your own sense of duty, but on the protection given to whistleblowers in the country you live in. Martin Bridger, a legal consultant and former senior police officer in the United Kingdom, explained to participants at the Second Preparatory Meeting of the OSCE’s 20th Economic and Environmental Forum in Dublin in April the difficulties that London’s Metropolitan Police faced in the late 1990s when trying to fight corruption:

The challenge was not just to tackle the ten percent of the force that was thought to be corrupt, but to break the culture of silence among the other ninety per cent of honest officers.

Employees are often the first people to learn about corruption in an organization, whether in the private or public sectors. According to John Devitt, the Chief Executive Officer of the Irish office of Transparency International, a global non-governmental organization working on anti-corruption issues, one in four cases of fraud are believed to have been exposed by whistleblowers, and it is estimated that over the last twenty years more than $20 billion has been saved for the state by employees speaking out in the United States alone.

Any country that wants to get serious about combating corruption therefore needs to ensure that those who come forward and speak out about corruption they discover around them in the workplace are adequately protected.

Far too often, however, the very people who bring the attention to corruption suffer themselves for their service, through victimization or job loss.

It’s understandable that people would be concerned about blowing the whistle and how they might be perceived by their employers and colleagues,” says Devitt. “It’s important therefore that employers and government make it clear that blowing the whistle is in everyone’s interest. Unfortunately, too few leaders in the public and private sector understand the role of whistleblowing in protecting the public interest and in defending human rights.”

In addition to creating an open, transparent and accountable culture in the workplace, whistleblowing limits the potential damage to an organization’s reputation and encourages early reporting of concerns – making the solutions easier.

In 1998 the United Kingdom passed the Public Interest Disclosure Act, which has come to be seen as a model for whistleblowing legislation. It protects workers from detrimental treatment and victimization from the employer if the disclosure is in the public interest and reports a case of wrongdoing. It also protects workers who have been dismissed as a result of exposing wrongdoing and compensates them for financial losses incurred.

Ireland is currently proposing new legislation in this area, which will in many aspects resemble the British approach. “It sounds quite obvious, but the legislation needs to be clearly written and then adequately enforced,” says Davitt. “In Ireland they have around thirty laws on the statute books aimed at protecting whistleblowers. The laws offer different levels of protection and only cover employees working in certain sectors and reporting very specified offences. You would need to be a lawyer to understand what protection you have. If anything, this ‘sector-by-sector’ approach has served to confuse people and leave them without the reassurance they need to come forward safely with information in the public interest.”

Transparency International runs a helpline, Speak Up, in Ireland, which has received more than 200 calls since its launch last year. “While it’s important for people to have alternative channels to report (such as hotlines), it’s vital that they also have helplines and advisers to turn to when they don’t know how or whether they should report a concern,” says Davitt.

Legal protections are important for whistleblowers but they also need advice to help them do the right thing.

There is one further element needed to ensure whistleblowers come forward: “Effective investigative capability is crucial,” says Bridger. “Laws and company policies are only as good as their implementation.”

The importance of protecting those who expose corruption is gaining recognition in the international community. The G20 leaders, at their summit meeting in Seoul in November 2010, identified the protection of whistleblowers as one of the high priority areas in their global anticorruption agenda. A forthcoming OSCE handbook on combating corruption will include a chapter on good practices for protecting whistleblowers, based on the experiences of OSCE participating States.