Whistle Blower Policy in Banks: Role of Employees

A whistleblower is the person, who reports some misconduct or something fishy flourishing under the carpet. It is an old phenomenon but new concept in Indian Management concept. Corruption is the biggest evil of the country and most of the time people are aware of the devil behind the evil but afraid of raising voice against due to lack of adequate protection and fear of harassment. Several cases have come across where mafias and criminals threatened, harassed and even murdered the person who raised voice against corruption.

To protect persons who reports cases of corruption, the Parliament enacted the Whistle Blowers Protection Act, 2011 which provides procedure of making complaint and maintain secrecy of the identity and protect such person.

Banking industry is the back bone of the economy but unfortunately has witnessed sharp increase in number of financial frauds and malpractices specially during last two decades and investigation revealed that on several occasions, malpractices, corruptions, abuse of delegated power; blatant violation of rules, recklessness in decision making etc. continued for months together by some influential persons in the branch and other staff had sufficient knowledge of it but remained silent spectators putting the public money into jeopardy. Had such instances could have been brought to the notice of the higher authorities further damage could have been avoided.

This article highlights critical analysis of Whistle Blower Protection and whistle policy of public sector and private sector banks with special reference to role of employees because most of the fraud in banking industry are of perpetual nature and takes place in several days and alertness of employees can definitely check such frauds.