The 2012 FCPA Guidance has about as clear, concise and short a statement about hotlines than any other tenet of an Effective Compliance Program. It states, “An effective compliance program should include a mechanism for an organization’s employees and others to report suspected or actual misconduct or violations of the company’s policies on a confidential basis and without fear of retaliation.” More than simply hotlines, companies must make real efforts to listen to employees. The Justice Department’s Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs states “How has the company collected, analyzed, and used information from its reporting mechanisms?” Managers must trained on how to handle employee concerns; they must be incentivized to take on this compliance responsibility and you must devote communications resources to reinforcing the company’s culture and values to create an environment and expectation that managers will raise employee concerns.

The reason is that its own employees are a company’s best source of information about what is going on in the company. It is a best practice for a company to listen to its own employees, particularly to help improve its processes and procedures. But more than listening to its employees, a company should provide a safe and secure route for employees to escalate their concerns. This is the underlying rationale behind an anonymous reporting system within any organization. Both the US Sentencing Guidelines and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Good Practices list as one of their components an anonymous reporting mechanism by which employees can report compliance and ethics violations. Of course, the Dodd-Frank Whistleblower provisions also give heed to the implementation of a hotline.

What are some of the best practices for a hotline? Start with at least the following:

Availability.

Anonymity.

Escalation.

Follow-Up.

Oversight.

In this area is that of internal company investigations, if your employees do not believe that the investigation is fair and impartial, then it is not fair and impartial. Furthermore, those involved must have confidence that any internal investigation is treated seriously and objectively. One of the key reasons that employees will go outside of a company’s internal hotline process is because they do not believe that the process will be fair.

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