A new report offers benchmarking data for compliance officers looking to see how their whistleblower hotline stacks up against their industry peers.

According to the 2010 Corporate Governance and Compliance Hotline Benchmarking Report published by The Network and BDO Consulting, personnel management incidents, which include human resources issues and incidents related to wage and hour and management interaction, remain the leading incident category across all industries, comprising nearly half of incident reports, followed by corruption and fraud (13 percent) and employment law violations (12 percent).

The report, which is available for free download here, is based on more than 500,000 actual incident reports from 2005 to 2009.

Reporting of fraud-related incidents (reports on corruption, fraud, misuse of assets or information, conflicts of interest, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations, etc.), which climbed steadily during the first quarter of each year from 2006 through 2009 from 10.9 percent to 20.6 percent, leveled of in the first quarter of 2010, at 20.2 percent. According to the report, that may be attributed to the current economic climate or the stabilizing of fraud reporting that may have increased dramatically with the implementation of awareness programs and a focus by companies on their GRC systems and processes.

Overall, the level of incident reports fell in 2009, with incident rates down in four of the five organizational size categories. Only organizations with 20,000 to 50,000 employees experienced an increase. On average over the past five years, organizations with fewer than 5,000 employees experienced the highest number of reported incidents, which the report says may reflect a lack of segregation of duties that is prominent in smaller organizations and provides for fewer checks and balances.

While retail trade; services industries, and the transportation, communication and utilities continue to have the highest overall incident report rates, the data shows that all of those industries experienced a decrease in their incident rate in 2009.

Seventy-one percent of participants did not notify management of an issue before making a hotline report in 2009. That statistic has stayed steady across all five years of data.

For the past five years, the majority of participants remained anonymous while submitting an incident via hotline. However, in 2009, the overall level hit a 50/50 split, and the report notes, in several industries, there was a shift from less than 50 percent of participants remaining anonymous in previous years to more than half choosing to remain anonymous in 2009.

From 2005 - 2008, hotline users that had given prior management notification were more likely to remain anonymous when making a report. In 2009, more participants who didn't previously report the incident chose to remain anonymous.

Nearly three-quarters of reports warranted an investigation in 2009, with 40 percent of those investigations resulting in corrective action.

The poster continues to be the most popular means of caller awareness (32 percent). However, the report notes that a company's Intranet and other electronic means are steadily growing in popularity.

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