Whistleblower Policy In Public And Private Organizations

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As whistleblowing has become an increasingly recognized and approved practice and its value to the public more appreciated, then legislation has been introduced initially to protect the whistleblower and more recently the legislation has been fine tuned to allow a form of reward to be paid out in certain cases.

To further legitimize the act of whistleblowing, most major corporations and public bodies have drawn up a clearly defined policy on the matter, and how they would expect their employees to act should a situation arise, where they would be expected to blow the whistle on a colleague or colleagues.

The fact that these policies have been dictated as their employers, almost as a term of their contract takes a lot of the onus of the whistleblower, and offers protection which was not always specific in the past.

Examples of typical irregular procedures where an employee is obliged to whistle blow run as follows: * Fraud or deliberate misreporting in the preparation, review or audit of a company's financial statement; * Fraud or deliberate misreporting in recording and maintaining of a company's financial records; and * Preparing false statements to a company's officers or accountants.

Once a complaint has been received, which can be of a financial or any other nature, procedures have to be carried out to ascertain the nature of the complaint and how it should be treated. The procedure should be as follows: * As soon as complaint is recorded, the official who is designated to handle it will ascertain the nature of the complaint and which department will be involved in its handling; * The person who made the complaint (the whistleblower) will receive a written confirmation of the complaint and how it will be handled; * Confidentiality will be maintained to the fullest extent possible, consistent with the need to conduct an adequate review; * Prompt and appropriate corrective action will be decided and taken. These are the standard procedures that have been adopted by most of the US states.

These measures have been introduced to protect and safeguard the interests of the whistleblower; however these statutes vary widely in coverage according to each state. In the public sector the statutes appear to be holding firm, however with in the private sector, whistleblowers appear not to be enjoying anything like the same levels of protection.