The Act describes “whistleblowers” as persons who, in connection with their work, report (either internally or externally) or publicly disclose the breach of law, provided that they act in good faith. The Whistleblower Protection Act does not apply to persons reporting breaches of labour law unless employers decide so. 

Who can report?

The whistleblower status is given to anyone who has acquired (and disclosed) information about potential breaches or circumvention of law in a “work-related context”. This means that organisations must receive and process reports from current and former employees, candidates for employment, trainees, people providing work under civil contracts (e.g. B2B, contracts of mandate, contracts for specific work), members of the company’s bodies or volunteers etc. This is not a closed list; what matters is that the whistleblower must remain in any professional relationship with the company in which a breach of law has occurred. 

Conditions for protection

The whistleblowers are protected from the time of reporting, provided that they had reasonable grounds to believe that the information reported was true and that it was information on the breach of law (good faith of the whistleblower). Any case of false information knowingly reported excludes protection against dismissal and exposes the reporting person to criminal liability for a criminal offence. 

Labour law and compliance regulations

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about the implementation of protection for whistleblowers reporting labour law breaches. Such extension of the Act scope would mean that persons reporting suspicions of mobbing, harassment, violation of OSH rules, working time standards or trade union rights would become “whistleblowers” within the meaning of the new Act. In the end, however, labour law was not covered by the Act. 

This does not mean that employers cannot extend their own internal procedures to include also cases of labour law breaches. The Whistleblower Protection Act allows breaches of internal compliance standards and regulations lawfully established to be covered too. Of course, the extension of the list of breaches the reporting of which will involve protection, will impose additional obligations on employers. On the other hand, this will enable controlling a much wider range of events within the company, align protection standards and increase employee confidence in the internal reporting procedure. The latter will mitigate the risk of external reporting (e.g. complaints to the National Labour Inspectorate). 
 

List of law breaches

The list of reports, which will obligatorily need to be covered by the Act, is on the one hand quite wide, and on the other one, specialised. At the last stage of working on the bill (still within the government), the list was extended to include a suspicion of corruption (in its broadest sense, including nepotism or conflict of interest) and breach of constitutional human rights and freedoms of man or the citizen by state authorities. 

Internal procedures must cover e.g. reports of breaches of law in the following areas: public procurement, protection of privacy and personal data, security of networks and ICT systems, consumer protection, financial interests of the State Treasury, local government or the European Union. 
 

Find more in the PRO HR Whistleblowers | June 2024.