NAVEX Global's newly released "2020 Risk & Compliance Hotline Benchmark Report" reveals key benchmarking data from organizations that received 10 or more hotline/incident reports in 2019 - consisting of 3,255 of the firm's customers and more than 1.4 million individual incident reports.
Noteworthy findings include:
- Reports of harassment declined to nearly pre-#MeToo levels, which may be attributable to any number of reasons including improved policies and procedures in response to #MeToo or - conversely - fears of speaking up.
- 43% of all reports were received via "All Other Methods" (i.e., not via the hotline or a web form submission), which include walk-ins, emails, open door, etc., compared to just 24% web-based submissions and 33% reports via a hotline, and reports submitted via "All Other Methods" had the highest substantiation rate by a large margin - illustrating the importance of capturing, monitoring and evaluating reports from all sources in lieu of a single source.
- The rate of anonymous reports increased year-over-year to 59% in 2019 from 57% the prior year. Substantiation rates for anonymous reports remain fairly high at 38% (compared to 50% for named reports).
See also NAVEX Global's release, "Ransomware mentioned in 1,000+ SEC filings over the past year" (ZDNet) and additional resources on our Whistleblowers and Compliance & Ethics pages. This post first appeared in the weekly Society Alert!