History of Ethical Reporting: The Path to
Digital Transformation

History of Ethical Reporting: The Path to Digital Transformation

History tells us that the earliest records of whistleblowers can be traced back to the ancient Roman Empire. Even in this ancient empire, the role of the whistleblower was institutionalized with its own legal status. These whistleblowers had a role in providing information to the public treasury, allowing for the collection of appropriate taxes from each taxpayer in the empire.

The foundations of what we now know as whistleblowers in the modern world date back to the mid-19th century in the United States. This evolution can be divided into three stages:

• Bounty Hunter Whistleblower: This emerged after the American Civil War when citizens and private investigators assumed law enforcement roles such as investigating and pursuing criminals in exchange for a reward.
• Whistleblower as a Defender of Ethics: After World War II, numerous regulations came into effect to protect workers, consumers, and the environment. Many business practices were illegal under the new regulations. There was little control and few sanctions against companies engaging in these practices. Due to the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War, social pressure against corruption increased, leading to changes in legislation related to whistleblowers, such as the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which protected government officials who reported corruption in administration.
• Whistleblowers in the Private Sector: In recent decades, these practices have adapted to the private sector. In 2002, this trend began with the adoption of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) in response to major financial scandals in the 1990s, such as the Enron scandal.

The adoption of whistleblower programs within organizations has gained momentum, initially starting with the well-known whistleblowing mailbox. Subsequently, hotlines or "tip lines" were adopted, which consisted of telephone lines for reporting misconduct. With the advent of the information age (the third industrial revolution), web technologies such as email and web forms were adopted.

With the arrival of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (digital revolution), the traditional means of communication mentioned above are perceived by whistleblowers as vulnerable or outdated for reporting. This is because these technologies do not guarantee the whistleblower's anonymity and leave possibilities for tracing the origin of the report, jeopardizing the whistleblower's safety.

The digital era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is providing us with specialized web and app technologies for whistleblowing that ensure anonymity and complete protection for whistleblowers. Additionally, they provide investigators with multiple digital tools to facilitate investigations, internal management of reports, and data analytics based on reported cases.

These new times are giving us powerful digital tools and weapons in favor of ethics in our organizations and society.

SHOGUN offers technological tools to drive digital transformation in the reporting process within your organization.

Author: André Barrantes
CEO and founder of SHOGUN Monitor. He is an expert in digital training development and specialized technology in Operational Fraud Prevention and corruption, with clients in over 20 countries in America and Europe.