Failing to encourage whistleblowers can cause damage to the business in the form of lost revenue, lost customers, a negatively impacted reputation and legal lawsuits or criminal charges.

The purpose of this policy, written by Scott Matteson for TechRepublic Premium, is to provide guidelines for the practice of whistleblowing to ensure unethical and/or illegal acts can be investigated, and guilty parties punished to protect the organization and its employees.

Featured text from the policy:

Whistleblowers are not to be responsible for investigating reported activities. This will fall upon the whistleblowing response team.

The whistleblowing response team will act upon the information provided by any and all methods available. This involves speaking to the accused or their peers, reviewing access or system logs, examining financial transactions, searching the accused’s workspace or other authorized methods to determine the details behind the report.

Whistleblowers shall identify themselves only to the whistleblowing response team, who will keep this person’s (or these people’s) identity a secret so long as legally feasible. It should be understood that, in the case of a civil or criminal trial, the whistleblower’s identity cannot be guaranteed to be kept secret.

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TIME SAVED: Crafting this content required 10 hours of dedicated writing, editing and research.