The Office of Competition and Consumer Protection has launched a special system for collecting information from anonymous whistle-blowers to expose misconduct or illegal activity anonymously.
Detecting competition-restricting practices is one of the UOKiK’s priorities. Anyone who wants to notify the Office of rival companies cooperating for their mutual benefit may use the following website: https://konkurencja.uokik.gov.pl/sygnalista/. Filing a report is simple and intuitive as all one has to do is fill in the fields of the form. The platform allows its users to attach documents confirming irregularities, e.g. photos or scans. This will help the Office assess the information more efficiently.
“When I was appointed President of UOKiK for the second time in 2016, a program for whistle-blowers was one of my first ideas. We opened a dedicated hotline and email address to encourage individuals to report any competition-restricting practice on an anonymous basis. As a result, we received several thousand reports. This is a very good result, but we want them to contain more valuable information. That is why we developed a special platform that will make it easier for people to report irregularities”, says the President of the UOKiK Marek Niechciał.
Importantly, the system protects the whistle-blower’s identity. Once an individual comes forward as a whistle-blower, he/she will receive a unique identifier and a password that will allow him/her to log back into the system and, if necessary, continue communication with the Office. The connection is encrypted and any metadata from attachments are removed. Only a limited number of UOKiK employees have access to notifications, but even they are unable to discover the whistle-blower’s identity.
“We value internal whistle-blowers in particular as they can provide us with information that is not publicly available, such as e-mails, internal notes, information about meetings between competitors. Such people may particularly care about their anonymity because they take the risk of facing retaliation from the employer. Thanks to our platform they will not have to fear this, because their anonymity will be protected”, says Michał Holeksa, the vice-president of UOKiK.
