Before Employees Speak Up: What the UN’s New Anti-Corruption Guide Gets Right

The UN’s anti-corruption and compliance guide received its first revision since 2013, and it wisely notes that not every employee concern comes with the easy-to-understand label of “wrongdoing,” explains Giuseppe De Palo, a former UN ombuds and president of the Dialogue Through Conflict Foundation. Trust, confidentiality and retaliation protection are the foundation for good employee reporting, and add technology to the list.

Companies have spent years improving the channels through which employees can report wrongdoing. The new United Nations’ guidance suggests that the next challenge may come one step earlier: helping people understand what they are experiencing, what options they have, and where they should turn before they are ready to make a formal report.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the UN Global Compact have just published the first full revision since 2013 of An Anti-Corruption Ethics and Compliance Programme for Business: A Practical Guide. One statistic explains why speak-up systems matter so much. In 2022, more than 40 percent of wrongdoing in companies was identified through whistle-blower reports, compared with less than 5 percent through internal controls.

But the guide does not stop at reporting channels. It emphasizes the conditions that make people willing to use them: trust, confidentiality, protection against retaliation and psychological safety. It notes that fear of retaliation is the main reason potential whistle-blowers, especially women, remain silent.

More interestingly, the guide recognizes that not every workplace concern arrives neatly labeled as “wrongdoing.”

Before the report

Reports involving discrimination or harassment, the guide observes, may be intertwined with conflicts inside teams or between managers and employees. In such cases, it can be difficult to know whether misconduct has occurred or whether communication problems and an underlying conflict contributed to the report. The guide therefore notes that companies with a proactive approach to conflict resolution and support functions such as ombuds, conflict-resolution teams and conflict-management training tend to handle these situations more effectively.

That distinction deserves more attention.

Whistle-blowing systems are, by design, built for the moment after an employee has concluded that something is wrong and is ready to report it. Yet, the harder moment often comes before that decision.

What exactly happened? Is this misconduct, a conflict, poor management or simply a difficult interaction? Is it serious enough to raise? Should I speak with my manager, HR, compliance or an ombuds? What happens if I do?

Organizations tend to build channels around institutional categories. Employees experience problems before they have categories.

For years, the usual answer was an open-door policy: managers, HR, compliance and ombuds offices made themselves available. But an open door is useful only after someone has decided which door to approach. For a remote employee, someone working across time zones, a person worried about retaliation or simply an employee who is unsure whether the issue warrants escalation, that threshold can remain surprisingly high.

Compliance

Marching Orders for DOJ’s Reshuffled Corporate Fraud Enforcers

by Jennifer L. Gaskin

October 7, 2026

The DOJ’s newest division has given its corporate fraud prosecutors their most substantive public guidance yet in the form of a memo that outlines factors they are to consider when deciding whether to bring charges against a corporation. CCI’s Jennifer L. Gaskin reports on what

Read moreDetails

Speak-up technology

Technology is beginning to change what is possible at this earlier stage.

Confidential digital conflict-management and ombuds tools can give employees a private place to understand an issue, explore possible responses and learn about available channels before deciding whether human intervention is necessary. They are not substitutes for investigators, HR professionals, compliance officers or human ombuds. Their value lies elsewhere: they can lower the threshold for seeking early guidance.

Our own experience developing such a tool illustrates the point. At one multilateral financial institution with an established professional ombuds office, employees interacted with the digital channel roughly 24 times for every direct contact with the human office. From 70 to 80%  of that use occurred outside normal working hours. Those interactions are not formal cases and should not be counted as such. But they suggest that substantial demand for early guidance may remain invisible when access requires an appointment, a telephone call or walking through someone’s door.

This matters particularly for smaller companies, geographically dispersed workforces and supply chains, where a staffed ombuds function may never have been economically realistic.

Will technology lag?

The UN Guide says that effective programs should be rooted in corporate culture, leadership commitment and accountability, not in controls alone. It also expressly places ombuds services among the mechanisms through which wrongdoing may come to light.

That should prompt a practical question for compliance leaders. If employees have a channel for reporting wrongdoing, what do they have before they are ready to use it?

For many companies, particularly smaller ones, the honest answer has long been very little that is confidential, independent and informal, because a staffed ombuds function was difficult to justify. That answer no longer holds. The tools exist, they have been tested in demanding institutions, and they cost a fraction of a staffed office. None of this makes them a legal requirement. But a company that endorses this guide and still offers its people no confidential place to turn before a concern becomes a report is no longer facing a constraint. It is making a choice, and it should be prepared to explain it.

In 1932, Judge Learned Hand held tug owners liable for failing to equip their tugs with radio receivers, even though doing so was not yet the practice of their industry. “A whole calling may have unduly lagged in the adoption of new and available devices,” he wrote. The next generation of speak-up systems may depend less on another reporting mechanism than on better pathways to the ones that already exist. The devices are available. The only question is how long the calling will lag.