Whistle-blowing is the first line of defence for organisations to uncover and mitigate activities of fraud and other malpractices. It plays a vital role in supporting ethics and compliance programmes for organisations. Whistle-blowing is also an alternate mode for communication between employees and management when other formal channels may present a barrier and are not supportive enough in revealing serious act of misconducts. Many organisations face challenges in establishing a robust whistle-blowing mechanism and subsequently have less convincing reporting channels that encourage employees to report suspicious incidents.
KPMG’s Ethics Helpline sservice provides a wide range of approaches that can assist organisations to establish and manage a secure, efficient and impartial whistle-blower reporting mechanism. We also assist our clients with review and development of whistle-blower policy, anti-sexual harassment policy and development of complaint redressal mechanism. In addition to this, we have the experience of facilitating surveys to gauge awareness and comfort level of employees to report genuine concerns and assess overall effectiveness of the whistle-blower mechanisms established by the organisation.
KPMG’s Ethics Helpline Service helps clients to operationalise their whistle-blower and ethics reporting mechanisms using multiple channels – phone, email, fax, physical letter and a web portal and at the same time maintaining an audit log for every complaint received. Our services are available in Hindi, English and Indian regional languages (Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada).
Reporting channels at the Ethics Helpline are managed by trained forensic professionals – no part of our service is outsourced. In addition to the report for each incident received by us, we supplement periodic reports to our clients to indicate trends or patterns of the incidents received through the mechanism. These reports have, in the past, helped organisations to set up a process for remediation and frame policies preventing vulnerabilities in their internal controls.
