Submission on the public consultations on reform to Australia’s whistleblowing frameworks

The two consultations were:

• The Australian Government consultation paper: ‘Review of tax and corporate whistleblower protections in Australia’; and
• The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services inquiry into whistleblowing protections in the corporate, public and not-for-profit sectors

The AICD has called for more robust protections of whistleblowers including reforms to:

• Broaden the definition of discloser to include people who have a former association with a company, as well as including additional categories of individuals (such as unpaid workers, and accountants and auditors);
• Broaden the range of topics about which a disclosure can be made to more accurately capture the scope of potential corporate wrongdoing;
• Remove the requirement that a disclosure be made in ‘good faith’ and replace it with a more objective test that does not focus on motive;
• Strengthen the protections against unlawful reprisal including tougher penalties for breaches;
• Give further consideration to a model for third party disclosures in extraordinary circumstances;
• Improve the compensation framework for whistleblowers who suffer victimisation or financial loss;
• Commit to a post-implementation review of the reforms that would include consideration of financial incentives for whistleblowing to regulators (the AICD does not support the introduction of US-style regulatory ‘bounties’ at this time); and
• Ensure that the focus of whistleblowing regulation is on incentivising early detection and prevention of wrongdoing, rather than on compliance with regulatory requirements.