Words To Assure Protection for Whistleblowers Can Evoke Fear
New study finds that vivid language intended to assure potential whistleblowers they will be protected from retaliation is instead likely to evoke fear and make them less likely to report misconduct.
The results of Wainberg and Perreault鈥檚 work should encourage the corporate world to rethink the increasing use of explicit anti-retaliation reminders in reporting systems. Rather than describing explicit protections offered from retaliation, they wrote, organizations could instead more explicitly describe the organization鈥檚 commitment to good corporate governance and ethical behavior.
A new study by researchers at 澳门六合彩历史记录 and Providence College has found that vivid language intended to assure potential whistleblowers they will be protected from retaliation is instead likely to evoke fear and make them less likely to report misconduct.
聽鈥淲hen you start listing all the protections that you鈥檙e giving them you start raising their awareness of the risks and dangers,鈥 said , Ph.D., a professor of accounting at 澳门六合彩历史记录鈥檚 College of Business and co-author of the study with , Ph.D., assistant professor at Providence College School of Business. 鈥淚t serves to raise their level of anxiety and has the opposite of its intended effect. All the protections are really a list of the things that can go wrong.鈥
It鈥檚 the first study to demonstrate that promoting explicit whistleblower protections can have the unintended consequence of actually inhibiting reporting of misconduct by intensifying the perceived risk of retaliation.
The researchers surveyed a group of students in a university graduate auditing course. The results suggest that explicitly raising the specter of retaliation, even to reassure potential whistleblowers they will be protected from it, increases perceptions of risk on average by about 25 percent over what it would be otherwise.
聽鈥淭hat鈥檚 really counterintuitive,鈥 said Wainberg, who鈥檚 also researching the impact of financial incentives for whistleblowers. 鈥淵ou really should be getting people to feel at ease and interested in calling.鈥
Whistleblowing has grown in recent years, thanks in large part to Congress鈥 enactment in 2002 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which protects whistleblowers who report violations of securities laws, and the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which significantly increased the protections available to whistleblowers in the financial services industry.
A 2014 Global Fraud Study by the found that whistleblower tips are by far the most common fraud detection method, accounting for more than 42 percent of all cases. That鈥檚 more than twice the rate of any other detection method. The study also found that employees account for nearly half of all tips that led to the discovery of fraud.
The study was published in the current issue of the American Accounting Association journal聽 . The results of Wainberg and Perreault鈥檚 work should聽encourage the corporate world聽to rethink the increasing use of explicit anti-retaliation reminders in reporting systems. Rather than describing explicit protections offered from retaliation, they wrote, organizations could instead more explicitly describe the organization鈥檚 commitment to good corporate governance and ethical behavior.
鈥淭here鈥檚 still a lot of research to be done in this area to look for what is really best practices in this regard,鈥 Wainberg said. 鈥淓ven though I鈥檓 all for these protections, listing all of them out may not be the best way to go.鈥
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