As per our previous blog post, very few members of the European Union managed to implement the provisions of the Whistleblowing Directive into their national legislation before the 17 December 2021 deadline for compliance. Germany is one of the countries that failed to meet the deadline, but as in a number of other EU countries, progress is now being made in relation to this.

In mid-April this year, the Federal Ministry of Justice published a draft bill – the Whistleblower Protection Act (Hinweisgeberschutzgesetz / HinSchG) – which should be in place by the Autumn. Its aim is to expand the protection for whistleblowers, which is currently considered insufficient by both EU and German legislators.

Key provisions

The key provisions of the draft bill are:

• The HinSchG obliges all companies with at least 50 employees to establish internal reporting channels for disclosures of wrongdoing. Some sectors will be required to have them irrespective of the number of employees, e.g. financial institutions and insurance companies. The HinSchG does not prescribe the form of the internal reporting channel in detail. Instead, how it should be designed depends on the organisational structure and the size and type of activity of the respective company, allowing for some level of proportionality in the process. However, the person performing the task of receiving and investigating disclosures must in all cases be able to act independently. To that end, it should be possible under the draft...

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