By Adam Turteltaub

The annual Navex Whistleblowing, Incident Management and Benchmarking Report provides valuable insights into what’s going on across the corporate compliance landscape. To get the highlights we spoke with Carrie Penman (LinkedIn), Chief Risk & Compliance Officer for Navex.

The 2023 data showed that reporting reached an all-time high, with 1.57 reports for every 100 employees, up from 1.47 the previous year. Substantiation reached an 11 year high at 45%, which indicates that compliance teams are getting both more and better reports out of the workforce.

Anonymity remained dominant, with 56% of reports arriving that way. Substantiation rates for anonymous reports held steady at 33%, which is lower than the 50% for reports given by an identified individual.

Accounting-related incidents accounted for 4.3% of reports, a relatively small number. However, they were notable because they had the longest period between the observation of suspected wrongdoing and reporting. They also were the least likely to be reported anonymously.

Third party reporters were likelier to report on business integrity issues, such as human rights, bribery and conflicts of interest. Substantiation rates were similar to those of anonymous reports.

So what should compliance teams be doing as a result of this data? First, she recommends continuing to build trust in reporting systems. Second, prepare for an increased number of reports.

Listen in to learn more about what is going on in incidents and whistleblowing.