Whistleblower Rewards Part II: Reactions to Dodd-Frank

As a follow up to our article Whistleblower Rewards: How Can Your Company Compete With The Government? that we wrote back in July 2011, we wanted to share the results of a survey completed by the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics and the Health Care Compliance Association: Dodd-Frank: Big Headlines, Not-So-Big Impact.

The Dodd-Frank Act, because of its whistleblower provisions, appeared to be setting the stage for a deluge of claims and reports to the SEC, undermining organizations’ existing compliance programs and reporting mechanisms.  An anticipated effect was the re-structuring of those compliance programs.

In short, the anticipated effects never really came to fruition.  According to the survey, only 6% of those who responded made sweeping changes to their compliance programs.  This may be due largely in part to the fact that 90% of responding organizations already have anonymous reporting solutions in place, 99% for publically-traded companies.

Many organizations did embrace some positive changes.  For example, 13% of those who responded made changes to their anti-retaliation policies, while communication to employees about how to report workplace misconduct increased by 75%.  Finally, 46% saw increased communication to managers about how to handle employee reports of misconduct in the workplace.  It’s these communication efforts that organizations expect to continue increasing in the future.

The conclusions we gather from this survey show that most organizations who have already embraced anonymous reporting solutions and anti-retaliation policies do not need to make sweeping changes to their compliance programs.  What we always tell our clients is that communication of their hotline to their employees is crucial to its success.  As a result of the Act, that’s exactly what’s happening.  Even beyond that, organizations are also seeing the value in helping their managers who are responsible for investigating the reports perform those investigations more efficiently and correctly based on a standardized process, something we’ve been training organizations around the world to do for years.

Check out information about our training here: Process of Investigations™ Training