In 2010, Piergiorgio Penzo had only been the director of Ipab, a public hospice in Chioggia near Venice, for less than a year, when he discovered irregularities in the hire and management of social workers in his institute. He reported the issue to the board and then to the authorities, which led to an (ongoing) investigation on a mismanagement of more than 800,000 euros (more than US$1 million).
The board of the hospice, though, first tried to make him resign and when he refused, ended up demoting him to deputy director.
Mr. Penzo is only one of many cases of workers in the public sector that try to denounce episodes of corruption every year in Italy; in many cases, the punishment falls on the whistleblower.
“The most likely way to learn about corruption in public administration is if somebody in the know denounces it, and that somebody is usually working inside the administration,” says Davide Del Monte, a project officer at the Italian chapter of Transparency International, speaking a few days after the launch of Anticorruption Alert (ALAC), a platform aimed at securely collecting information on corruption and mismanagement from whistleblowers in both the public and private sectors. The project is co-funded by the Prevention of and Fight against Crime Programme of the European Union
ALAC uses GlobaLeaks, an open-source software specifically designed to protect the identity of the whistleblower and the receiver when they exchange confidential material.
The software,...
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