With U.S. regulatory agencies increasingly telegraphing to U.S. companies their intention to step up enforcement actions against retaliation toward whistleblowers, it’s alarming that employers are taking 18 percent longer—a median period of 46 days in 2015 versus 39 days in 2014 and 32 days in 2011—to complete investigations into whistleblower claims. This trend is particularly significant for organizations overseen by the SEC, as they have limited time to complete internal investigations under that agency’s whistleblower provisions.
The extended case closure time is one of the findings in NAVEX Global’s 2016 Ethics & Compliance Hotline Benchmarking Report, released March 15. If companies aren’t keeping up an ongoing dialogue with them, whistleblowers are more likely to assume their employer doesn’t care or looked into the claim but didn’t find anything, says Carrie Penman, chief compliance officer and senior vice president of advisory services for NAVEX. Even human relations diversity-related complaints, which don’t require the time-consuming document checking that accounting fraud cases do, are taking 20 percent longer to be resolved, which can hurt morale and make relationships within a department more uncomfortable, she says.
