The Week of Integrity began on Dec. 9 with a session provided by Transparency International Netherlands (TI NL), where their new report on whistleblower structures at large companies in the Netherlands was presented. Transparency International focuses on preventing and combating bribery and corruption. Because bribery and corruption are often uncovered by whistleblowers, they also work hard to protect whistleblowers and try to lower the threshold for reporting as much as possible. As a result, organizations and society can save millions, if not billions, of dollars. And avoid the other disastrous effects of corruption.
In the report, TI NL assesses the qualities of whistleblowing procedures and money structures in large Dutch companies. In determining the score, it looked at the degree of protection afforded to whistleblowers by the company, the effectiveness of the whistleblower procedure and how the culture supports the proper reporting structure, particularly looking at utterances by leadership. The data were collected by asking the companies about this. If there was no answer, then they tried to collect the data through public sources on the Internet.
Five years ago, TI NL had conducted a similar survey. However, with the introduction of the Whistleblower Protection Act, the legislative framework has changed, so the investigations are not very comparable. Yet it seems that most companies have made progress; their reporting structures have improved. However, particularly in the area of culture, there still seems to be considerable room for improvement.
Of the large companies in the Netherlands, KPN, Eneco and Philips achieved the highest scores. When companies were broken down into sectors, industrial companies such as Philips, AkzoNobel, ASML and Signify scored best, followed by financial services companies such as Aegon, ABN AMRO, NN Group and ING.
The lowest scores were achieved by Google, HEMA and CSC (Intertrust). However, the scores for Google and CSC were determined by reviewing the information on the websites of their Dutch branches. Perhaps this information was not complete.
In any case, we did find it striking that the large accounting firms were not among the top performers. While they still sometimes act as consultants in this matter.
The report concludes with some recommendations to improve the reporting structure. These recommendations will be familiar to regular readers of our newsletter.
