Tuning the whistle

Companies working to build or sustain an ethical culture are discovering that the process requires not only that they look inside their operations but also a fair degree of external comparison. Benchmarking, long applied to business processes and functions, is now offering valuable insight into industry best practices around ethics and compliance programmes and the tools that underpin them, writes Ralston McCracken of EthicsLine. A recent report by The Network, The Chief Security Officer (CSO) Executive Council and the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) takes a comprehensive look at whistleblower hotline activity, analyzing 250,000 incident reports from 500 organisations over a five-year period. The findings offer important information to companies as they seek to measure the performance and business value of their programme against others in the industry, assess their overall cultural health and drive future enhancements.

Ralston McCracken, Vice President of Sales and Business Development at The Network, Inc.(EthicsLine). He may be contacted on RalstonMcCracken@tnwinc.com, www.tnwinc.com. This article is based on an address that the author gave at the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners 2008 European Fraud Conference (www.acfe.com).

The 2006 Corporate Governance and Compliance Hotline Benchmarking Report aggregated data from organisations representing all sizes and sectors, then classified each reported incident into one of seven categories and measured frequency to determine which incidents were most widely reported.