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Lantero holds a seminar on setting up and working with a whistleblowing system. The seminar is primarily aimed at companies and organizations between 50 and 250 employees, who under Swedish legislation will be subject to new whistleblowing requirements from the end of 2023.  The seminar is led by Andreas Wahlström. We discuss concrete issues and start from both legislation / practice and practical experiences from more than eight years in the industry.  Date: March 23 Time 3.30-4.15 PM CET Registration is done here. 

Lantero starts operations in France and will henceforth have local expertise and staff. The agreement was celebrated with champagne! "We already work in many markets, but long-term want to ensure that we have dedicated teams locally to be able to service national markets based on specific needs and cultural deviations. We have now been working for several months to get everything in place with our French team and very much looking forward to meeting the French market with complete French backing," says Andreas Wahlström, partner manager Lantero.

After the new EU-rules on whistleblowing and whistleblower channels came into force this summer in Sweden, most Swedish municipalities have established systems for reporting misconduct. In most municipalities, solutions have been chosen that enable anonymous reporting and provide support for the handling process, even if the legislation only requires guaranteeing confidentiality linked to whistleblower cases. - It's a lot about creating trust in the system among everyone who should be able to report, says Andreas Wahlström, who has helped around fifty municipalities establish whistleblower solutions. An anonymous channel is a signal that you as an organization are more interested in solving the misbehavior than in who has reported. Regarding the staffing of the whistleblower solutions, it is common for municipalities to work with internal resources for the processing. External investigative assistance is usually engaged only when there is a concrete risk of conflicts of interest. For many municipalities (for example Borgholm, example in Swedish) are now starting to work on getting the information out to the parties concerned, in order to start the work of dealing with the irregularities that are discovered and hopefully building long-term better organizational cultures.

Lantero's CEO comments in Dagens Industri (Swedish) on the strong development for whistleblower services. Due to the new law, the market has gained momentum, which is expected to continue in the coming years. The article discusses how different players handle pricing in different ways, depending on whether the business model is based on the system solution or on investigation services.

In an interview in Dagens Nyheter (Swedish), Project Manager Tina Bohlin talks about the new whistleblower standard and what significance it may have in relation to the new legislation in the area. Tina Bohlin talks about the international collaboration around developing the standard, which organizations are affected and how an organization can approach the issue. Among other things, she describes how the work becomes easier if you have worked with the issue before and already have some type of solution and routines in place. She also describes that the standard is not directly linked to certain legislation, but should be international and general. It therefore cannot be guaranteed that a solution based on the standard will meet all legal requirements. Tina Bohlin is also clear about the importance of working with openness in the organizational culture so that people will dare to speak out about misconduct.

Swedish medical industry daily newspaper Dagens Medicin acknowledges the lack of whistleblower systems in a majority of the Regional Authorities. The article (Swedish) mentions the upcoming EU legislation, making such systems mandatory. 

There is a new international standard for whistleblower systems, ISO 37002: 2021. The standard is a guidance and will be handy as the new whistleblower EU legislation comes into force at the end of the year.  National committees have participated in the work and Lantero has been part of the Swedish committee under SIS management.  Overall, it can be said that it is a document developed to be as useful as possible for companies and organizations in all countries, regardless of local legislation. The standard therefore aims to take on different perspectives on relevant issues and problems, and give the tools to assess risks depending on the organizations own conditions. The standard is less focused on how to handle specific legislation. From Lantero's perspective, the standard could have been clearer on information security issues and more clearly highlighted the risks that apply to internal investigators of whistleblower cases, but in general the standard covers most important issues in the area.

The new law on whistleblowing is coming soon. The interest is great, and the questions are many.  What should you as a corporate leader  do to comply with the law and get the greatest possible business impact. Lantero was invited to a webinar with Nordea Private Banking to share thoughts and experiences. You can see the result here divided into three short films (in Swedish), each focusing on a relevant area. Without going into too many details, it gives you a good overview of the challenges and the opportunities. Part one, what is the new whistleblowing law about?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w58-_XqrSdA Part two, The whistelblowing process in four steps, that you should know about. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGb3C-pVwvc Part three: What kind of reports can you expect and how do you maximize the positive impact when implementing a whistleblowing channel?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uwd6-HbQEWo

When the new whistleblower directive is implemented in Swedish legislation, it is proposed that Groups may not share reporting channels for subsidiaries with more than 249 employees. In a debate article (Swedish) in Dagens Industri, general counsels in a number of large Swedish companies raise the issue and call for a change in the proposed legislation. The argument is about increased bureaucratisation and that there are in fact greater opportunities for independent handling of disclosed cases if the function is centralized. The debate article makes important points and takes a practical perspective, where the new legislation risks creating more problems than it solves. However, it is worth considering what limitations are actually proposed. If, for example, separate reporting channels are established, the same administrator could possibly investigate cases for several Group companies if the assignments are regulated by separate agreements. Our assessment is that the procedure would be fully viable if it is an external law firm that staffs the whistleblower solution. But the question is whether it would not also be feasible to apply the same logic with an internal Group of Trustees at the Group Head Office.

The proposal for the Swedish implementation of the EU Whistleblower Directive went to the Legal Affairs Council in mid-April. The proposal was accepted without further comments by the Legal Affairs Council and a final bill could therefore be presented on 25 May. (Read more here, in Swedish) There are no big surprises in the proposal, but compared with the previous Swedish whistleblower law (which is now being replaced) there are some changes. Most noticeably, it will be mandatory for organizations with more than 50 employees to set up a whistleblower channel, including some specific requirements on how reporting can take place and requirements on independent handling of disclosures. What is considered a "whistleblower case" is also changed and broadened. An important change in the wording is that there should be a public interest in the information coming out. What is considered public interest is not entirely clear, but overall the threshold for what can be reported is lowered, at the same time as the lawmaker aims at getting rid of matters concerning individuals and focus more on systematic misconduct. According to the proposal, the law will enter into force on 17 December, 2021.