NAVEX’s 2022 Risk & Compliance Hotline & Incident Management Benchmark Report reveals an increase in internal reporting about misconduct and an increase in allegations of retaliation. The analysis of data from 3,470 organizations that received more than 1.37 million individual reports identified the following trends (see the full report for a discussion of additional trends and analysis of the data):

• “More actual allegations of misconduct, rather than inquiries about policies or possible misconduct. Ninety percent of all reports in 2021 were allegations of misconduct, up from 86 percent last year and hitting an all-time high since our first benchmark report more than ten years ago.”
• “Reports about retaliation, harassment and discrimination jumped – especially retaliation. In 2021, reports of retaliation nearly doubled . . . Taken altogether, these findings suggest employees are more attuned to workplace civility issues. That would fit with external trends such as more talk about systemic racism, income inequality and political divisions; as well as increasing protection for whistleblowers and employees’ awareness of those protections.”
• “Substantiation rates continue to edge upward. Overall substantiation rates rose from 42 percent in 2020 to 43 percent in 2021, and up from 36 percent a decade ago. The reports substantiated most often were data privacy concerns (63 percent), environmental issues (59 percent), and confidential and proprietary information (54...

Read Full Story: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=1d195e25-1342-4f92-914b-4872b6...