Every company has a duty to comply with existing regulations.
The Anglo-Saxon term compliance encompasses adherence to laws, ordinances and regulation as well as your company’s own regulations. However, compliance is now also shaped quite significantly by the expectations of your company’s ecosystem, so social responsibility and elements of sustainability should be included in the set of regulations.
Courageous? Disloyal? Whistleblowers are people who blow the whistle on other people or organizations. For these people, it is usually important that existing regulations and laws are observed and that misconduct to the detriment of organizations and society is stopped. Thus, they open up many opportunities with their tips: If critical information about wrongdoings in the company is not made public, but is received through internal reporting channels, the management level can deal with it proactively.
In this way, financial damage can be averted, grievances can be uncovered at an early stage and company departments can be optimized. A positive reporting culture that signals that critical knowledge is welcome and does not fall on deaf ears increases employee satisfaction and improves the image. In this respect, the whistleblower system, which the EU Whistleblower Directive prescribes for all companies with more than 50 employees, is a good way to make one’s own company more transparent.
The new year marks the beginning of the annual financial reporting season. All companies that prepare financial reports have to deal with the issues surrounding the preparation of their annual financial statements. Even if many of those responsible are not aware of it: accounting compliance forms the foundation here. It ensures that all relevant accounting rules are recognized and applied, and that the company’s assets and liabilities are valued correctly, so that the annual financial report is prepared in accordance with the rules.
The implementation of the EU Whistleblower Directive is on the agenda of many small and medium-sized companies. Managing directors and compliance officers immediately think of lawyers and software, but it takes a lot more to implement the guideline not only in a legally secure way, but also in a motivating and profitable way.
Our expert Karin Scherer puts it in a nutshell: “Many managing directors would like to receive information from the staff when the company is damaged, whether negligently or intentionally, internally by employees or by external persons. Our experiences range from reaching into the till, theft of goods to sexual harassment at the workplace. All incidents in which those in the know or affected did not know how to act, looked a way as a precaution – and in which the management would have liked to have been informed at an early stage, to protect the employees affected and the company.”
