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Safe 2 Say

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In the space of just a few years, less than a decade ago, some of the US’s biggest corporations – like Enron and WorldCom – were rocked by scandals.

One after the other were revealed to have been involved in corporate and accounting fraud, resulting in huge losses for investors, imprisonment and huge fines for some of the guilty executives and the introduction of a new federal law designed to help prevent such deception in the future.

The Sarbanes- Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) requires publicly-traded US companies are also required to establish procedures that allow their employees – wherever located – to report fraud and questionable accounting or auditing matters anonymously.

Fred Giles, vice president Research Services, reacalls: “Naturally, company executives and boards of directors looked for ways to mitigate that liability. The federal sentencing guidelines outline a number of steps that can help companies reduce that responsibility, including establishing a corporate ethics policy and publishing it to employees, and also making sure employees have a means to report – anonymously if they choose – their concerns about illegal or unethical behaviour. And that really became the springboard from which G4S Safe2Say grew.”

By the time the new law was enacted, US-based G4S Wackenhut had already been providing hotline services for almost two decades.

“Our very first hotline was set up in 1984 in response to a customer request,” explains John Hart, manager Research Services, G4S Wackenhut. “One of our manned security customers, a major grocery chain here in Florida, asked if we would be able to operate a 24/7 loss prevention line, where employees could call in, anonymously if they liked, to report any incidents of loss producing activity in any of their stores or distribution centres.

“Since we already maintained a 24/7 despatch centre for our own security officers, we agreed to incorporate the hotline into that programme.”

It was so successful that other customers sought similar call centre services and so G4S Wackenhut’s Consulting and Investigations department took over responsibility for the hotlines. Having been tipped off about irregularities or malpractices, customers often needed help and advice about how best to respond to the information, and the investigations team was well qualified to assist by providing an action plan and, where requested, following it through.

Not just a US issue

The SOX law of 2002 puts the focus very much on accounting and financial issues and it brought with it a further complication for US public companies. Many of them are multinationals and the new legislation requires them to apply the same stringent standards to their overseas companies and provide their employees in those countries with the same opportunities to report failures to comply.

It wasn’t long before G4S Safe2Say’s US customers were seeking help in complying not only with their own government’s corporate requirements but also with the sometimes conflicting demands of the European Union’s data protection laws and labour laws.

The solution was not difficult to find.

G4S Wackenhut began talking to its sister company in Brussels.G4S Security Services (Belgium)’s Monitoring and Mobile Services team not only has its own alarm receiving centres (ARCs) but is also networked with all the other G4S ARCs in Europe.

This will facilitate the use of a single toll-free hotline number for all G4S Safe2Say’s European customers.

A pilot project with a longstanding G4S Safe2Say US customer with an extensive presence in Europe was recently concluded with very satisfactory results and the Brussels team, under business unit manager Steven Janssens and operations manager Marc Bormans, is now ready to assist US owned companies operating in Europe. Many are almost drowning in a sea of apparently conflicting demands as they try to satisfy US and EU legal requirements.

“The big advantage for G4S Safe2Say customers is that they will know they are calling a hotline number located in Brussels, answered by Europeans, and the data collected will be stored in Europe.” says Steven Janssens.

Right now, however, G4S Safe2Say’s focus is very much on giving US companies based in Europe as much help as possible. “We believe we’re the only company operating a standalone call centre of this type in Europe,” says Fred Giles, “and there are few US competitors who can boast two decades of experience in providing integrity and compliance programmes as well as enjoying such a powerful partnership with European colleagues.
This page is an edited version of the Roy Stemman article featured in the June 2007 edition of International.
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Back Office Operations

The only really effective way of ensuring anonymity for employees who want to tell someone what is really happening within a major corporation is to provide them with a round-the-clock 365-day hotline service managed by an independent provider.

Hotlines are now being used in the US for employees to raise a very wide range of concerns including discrimination, harassment, safety violations and hazardous situations

When hotlines were first introduced in the US there were fears that they would be misused to make false allegations and slander people.

That hasn’t happened. Instead, they have proved a very useful tool, allowing companies to keep their finger on the pulse of their businesses by listening to people prepared to tell it as it is.

In time, if it mirrors the US’s experience, European resistance to such programmes is expected to lessen as employees become more comfortable with the concept.