How Whistle Willow helps your organization meet compliance regulations

EU Whistleblower directive came into force in December 2019 and outlined the key requirements for organizations when it comes to handling whistleblowing reports.

Whistle Willow is a platform that makes complying with the Directive simple. At the same time, as for any compliance goal, it can only be achieved when tools, processes, and organizational commitment are set up to work together on achieving the desired compliance state.

The Directive outlines a few key compliance requirements, and Whistle Willow is here to help your team meet them.

1. Whistle Willow provides a secure and anonymous channel for whistleblowers to report misconduct. For full compliance, a reporter should be able to upload the evidence to the app. We encourage both reports and orgs to use secure drop sites rather than directly upload the evidence - to avoid potential negative consequences, deanonymization and retaliation. One way to do so would be to set up a Secure Drop and instruct your reporters to use it and include the link to the drop in their report, as this would be the safest way to provide evidence to your team.

2. Some countries require organizations to set up a call center or a hotline to accept reports in audio format. For meeting this requirement, we recommend using the same Secure Drop and then to ask reporters to record and submit their tips as audio files. A link to the drop can be added to the Whistle Willow report.

3. Whistle Willos also allows for real-time communication between the whistleblower and the organization's compliance team, ensuring a swift and effective response to any reports. Make sure to add a notification email in settings to get an email alert on any new reports submitted to the program.

4. When a report is submitted, to meet the compliance requirements of the Directive, it needs to be acknowledged within 7 days and then responded to within the 90 days since the submission. Whistle Willow helps you by notifying your compliance team when a report first arrives; when the compliance deadlines are approaching or are breached.

5. The app also offers detailed reporting and analytics, including Compliance alerts on any reports that put your organization at risk of complying with the Directive. The analytics and reporting of Whistle Willow allow organizations to track and respond to reports in a timely manner, as well as identify any patterns or trends when it comes to whistleblowing program state.

6. Whistle Willow is user-friendly and easy to navigate, making it accessible to employees at all levels of an organization. It also offers a range of language options (which can be configured through the public submissions site), making it suitable for organizations with a diverse and distributed workforce.

Overall, when implementing your whistleblowing program, Whistle Willow can cover most of your compliance needs, but a few extra steps still need to be taken in order to be fully compliant. Our team constantly works on new functionality to minimize the overhead and deliver as close to the out-of-box. compliance as possible