‘The 2013 Corporate Governance and Compliance Hotline Benchmarking Report’ – compiled by governance and compliance consultant The Network Inc. and BDO Consulting – comprises data from over 624,046 incident reports from between 2008 to 2012 and notes an increase in incident reports in four out of the five organisational size categories, Compliance Week reports.

High rates

Companies with 5,000 to 10,000 employees sat atop the list with the highest rate of hotline incident report at 12.6 per cent, followed by companies with more than 50,000 employees at 12.1 per cent. In contrast, companies with 20,000 to 50,000 employees saw its incident rates decrease.

Fraud hits all-time high

Personnel management emerged as the leading incident category with 46 per cent of reports that covered issues such as human resources and employee relations, followed by employment law with 15 per cent of incidents, corruption and fraud at 13 per cent and employment law violations at 12 per cent. The reporting of incidents related to fraud jumped to 23.6 per cent from 21.1 per cent in 2011, allegedly an all-time high for the Corporate Fraud Index since its induction in 2005.

Construction industry

In terms of specific industries, seven out of ten of the industry categories saw an increase in incident reports, the largest of which in the construction industry, and the largest decrease in the Finance, Insurance & Real Estate industry.