Whistleblower Reports Are Spiking. Is Your Program Ready?

Economic pressure, regulatory whiplash, organizational restructuring, and AI’s growing workplace presence are converging in a way that is at once. The result is more people speaking up, about more complicated things, in more places, at the same time.

That was the throughline of a recent Ethisphere webinar, Global Whistleblowing: When Volumes Spike, Will Your Program Keep Up?, featuring:

• Steph Holmes, director of ethics and compliance strategy at EQS Group;
• Adam Balfour, vice president and general counsel for corporate compliance and data privacy, Americas and EMEA, at Bridgestone Americas; and
• Mary Inman, founding partner at Whistleblower Partners, who has spent 30 years representing whistleblowers in the U.S. and abroad.

Steph, Adam, and Mary’s composite perspective on why and how overall business volatility is driving misconduct reporting—and what organizations can do about it—speaks directly to what might be the central them of speak-up culture in today’s business environment. Let’s pop the hood and take a look.

Why the Volume Is Climbing, and Why It’s Harder to Read

Benchmarking data across the ethics and compliance space points toward: higher reporting volume, more complicated cases, and more allegations and cross-border facts than used to be typical.

Live polling during the webinar backed this up. About half of attendees said their reporting volume had increased or seriously increased over the past year, while only 6% saw a decrease. Confidence in handling that volume splits, though: 43% felt confident, 6% highly confident, and 36% landed on “uncertain, ask me again in six to 12 months.”

Here’s the thing: reporting spikes rarely are as isolated as they look. A rise in overall numbers can mask a decline at one location. Or, a spike driven by a local manager problem rather than anything systemic. The smart move is to segment spiking reporting data by business unit, region, and case type before deciding what to do about it.

(Some of the increase may nothing to do with wrongdoing at all. Intake systems are seeing a wave of submissions written with AI tools, complete with legal citations no layperson would produce on their own, which makes sorting a genuine concern from an AI-assisted essay a new kind of triage problem.)

Meanwhile, government enforcement adds its own volatility, with U.S. As Federal whistleblower enforcement cools under the current administration, reward programs have expanded to cover trade cartels, immigration, and antitrust violations. (Other countries are following suit, too, with the UK adopting its first reward program for tax evasion last November.)

AI Cuts Both Ways Inside the Reporting Process

AI is good at processing volume, such as sorting large sets of emails or documents, flagging relevant material, summarizing case files. It’s just as useful for the people making reports as for the teams investigating them. Rewriting a submission to strip out identifying writing style, or help someone find the words for a concern they struggle to articulate, gives people who might otherwise stay silent a way in. AI is particularly helpful for international whistleblowers who wish to navigate laws and language barriers that might otherwise keep them from speaking up at all.

What AI can’t do is replace a good process. And, it will expose a bad one fast. If escalation paths aren’t clearly documented, feeding those gaps into an AI system just moves the confusion along faster. One industry benchmark on AI performance in compliance tasks found real gains in categorization, summarization, and even judgment-heavy work like drafting an investigation plan, provided a human reviews the output. Full automation isn’t there yet.

The double edge to this is that tools built to analyze employee communications for compliance purposes can just as easily identify who’s speaking up (through metadata or writing-style analysis) as surveillance dressed up as insight. Research on the surveillance-compliance paradox shows the effect runs the wrong direction: the more employees feel watched, the less likely they are to report anything at all. An anonymity policy means nothing if the tools behind it can quietly undo it.

Speed Isn’t the Same Thing as Trust

For the person making a report, speaking up is rarely a small decision. It often follows months or years of deliberation and counts among the more significant moments in someone’s working life. How the organization handles what comes next builds trust or breaks it, regardless of the outcome.

Responsiveness and speed aren’t interchangeable. A thorough investigation takes the time it takes, especially when it’s complex. But when reporters hear nothing for weeks start assuming the worst, trust breaks down, and retaliation becomes easier to hide. Regular updates and a tone that stays neutral on the facts, without going cold on the person, matter more than shaving days off a case-closure metric.

Retaliation follows familiar patterns: denial, discrediting the person who spoke up, and quietly dismissing their concerns. It also shows up in smaller, harder-to-prove ways, like someone no longer getting invited to meetings they used to be part of — a pattern that can leave a whistleblower doubting their own read of the situation. Nearly every culture has its own word for reporting on a colleague, and none of them are flattering. The more useful framing is that people who speak up are usually among the most loyal people in the organization, taking on personal risk because they care enough about the place to do something about a problem instead of walking past it.

One Global Process, Many Local Realities

Programs operating across multiple countries face a version of this problem that a single policy document can’t solve. A process can be consistent on paper and still land differently depending on where an employee sits. In some cultures, going over a manager’s head simply isn’t done; in others, it’s expected. Local law adds another layer: in Costa Rica, for example, sexual harassment allegations can’t be filed anonymously, which means a global anonymous-reporting policy needs a documented local exception built in ahead of time, not discovered mid-case.

Smaller or more remote business units compound the problem. A location without a dedicated compliance or HR presence forces a choice every time a report comes in: send someone from corporate who may not speak the language, or bring in a local third party. Organizations that handle this well decide the answer in advance, before the first report from that location arrives.

Mergers and acquisitions carry a related risk. Danske Bank’s money-laundering scandal traced back to an Estonian branch it had acquired, operating under a different culture and oversight than the parent company was used to. Blending organizations across borders is exactly where visibility gaps tend to open, which is reason enough to treat newly acquired units as their own risk category.

Building a Program That Scales

The biggest bottleneck in most investigations sits in departments the investigation team depends on but doesn’t control. HR review, legal sign-off, and escalation approval all live outside compliance’s direct authority, and when a case isn’t a stated priority for those functions, it waits. Technology can make that bottleneck visible, but it can’t do much about it.

The more durable fix is to pay attention to what happens before someone goes to the hotline. Managers who talk regularly with their teams about what’s worth raising (and how to raise it) change the numbers upstream the same way a building that maintains its smoke detectors doesn’t wait for a fire to find out something’s wrong.

There’s also a well-documented gap in who reports at all. Women and reporters of color are statistically the least likely to file a formal complaint, and the most likely to simply leave the organization instead. That makes exit interviews worth real weight rather than an afterthought, and it means the signals an organization sends about whether speaking up is genuinely valued, including whether raising concerns shows up in a performance review, matter more than most compliance teams realize.

Ultimately, speak-up culture is a byproduct of how people are treated when they raise their hand. Technology can absorb volume, standardize workflows, and clear away a lot of the operational noise that makes scaling hard. But making an employee feel heard is still a human job, and probably always will be. And as report volumes keep climbing, that may be the part of the program that matters most.

Watch the full conversation with Steph Holmes, Adam Balfour, and Mary Inman on demand: Global Whistleblowing: When Volumes Spike, Will Your Program Keep Up?

Author Bio

Bill Coffin  |  Editor-in-Chief, Ethisphere Magazine, Ethisphere

Bill Coffin is an internationally recognized writer and editorial leader in the fields of ethics, compliance, insurance and risk management. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, Forbes and Fortune, as well as Compliance Week, National Underwriter, Risk Management, Best’s Review and other B2B media. Previously, Bill served as Director, Senior Editor at AIG, leading content strategy for one of the world’s largest insurance companies.