In my last post, I discussed and critiqued a proposal, advanced in a policy paper published by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), for a mandatory reporting requirement in Israel’s public sector. Under the IDI paper’s proposal, a public official who, acting in his or her official capacity, formed a “substantial suspicion” that corruption has taken place or will take place could face disciplinary sanctions for failing to report this suspected corruption “as soon as possible.” I criticized this proposal on the grounds that it would both discourage reporting in those cases where a potential whistleblower is reluctant to report right away and so delays for a period of time, and would also deter employees from cooperating with investigators by sharing relevant information that they had not previously disclosed. In both of these cases—the employee who didn’t report right away but might be willing to report later, and the employee who didn’t voluntarily report but might be willing to share information when questioned by investigators—the threat of disciplinary sanctions for failure to report immediately may actually induce employees to keep silent, especially since the chances they will be caught and punished if they never reveal what they suspected are generally quite low. Instead of imposing a mandatory reporting requirement, I argued, Israel (and similarly situated countries) should strengthen positive incentives for whistleblowers, offering them more generous rewards and more effective protections against retaliation.
While many readers broadly agreed with my critique of the IDI paper’s mandatory reporting proposal in its current form, several colleagues suggested that a modified version of the mandatory reporting requirement might be effective and appropriate. In this post, I consider what seem to me the most plausible and promising revisions to the original IDI proposal, and evaluate whether these modifications would overcome my principal critiques: Continue reading
