How To Include Reports To Managers In Internal Reporting

Compliance officers know that internal reports are the fuel upon which your compliance program runs – the more reports you receive, the better you understand the compliance issues within your organization and the faster you can address them.

This means your internal reporting system should include reports employees make to their managers, rather than to your hotline directly – but how does one do that, exactly? What steps should the chief compliance officer take to ensure that you do hear about all those complaints going to managers? It's certainly a question worth answering.

As documented in the NAVEX 2025 Whistleblowing & Incident Management Benchmark report, organizations that track all methods of internal reporting receive an average of about 1.2 more reports per 100 employees than organizations that only track reports received via telephone hotline and web channels. See Figure 1, below.